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SEEING IT THROUGH 




Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/seeingitthroughhOOadco 



SEEING IT THROUGH 

HOW BRITAIN ANSWERED 
THE CALL 



A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK 



HODDER AND STOUGHTON 

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO 

MCMXV 



.ft* 



Printed in Great Britain by Wyman & Sons Ltd., London and Reading. 



i««i. 

//"" 



BRITAIN'S WAY. 

There's a stir in every street 

Like the sound of hearts that beat — 

Every road that leads from England 
Pulses with the tramp of feet ; 
Who are these that without stay 
Down the dark and dusty way 

Of the Valley of the Shadow 
March with faces toward the day ? 

These are they who, called to arms, 
Came from shops, and desks, and farms — 

Men of Peace while Peace was with us, 
Men of War at War's alarms ! 
Swift the warning message ran 
To the Empire's farthest span, 

And they rose for England's honour, 
Armed for love of God and man. 

They have nothing there to gain 
On the thunderous battle-plain 
But the saving of the nations 
That a tyrant would enchain ; 



They have seen the wrongs he wrought*, 
And, undriven and unbought, 

Go to fight again for Freedom, 
As of old their fathers fought. 

Let the wordy War-Lord boast 
Of his mighty vandal host, 

He shall end " The Day " he drank to 
In the Night he did not toast ! 
He and all his ravening race, 
Brutes primeval, blonde and base, 

Have outlived their barbarous era 
And are passing to their place. 

From the Britons oversea 
That have never bent the knee 

At the throne of any tyrant 
Come the cohorts of the free : 
They are with us to defend 
All the Prussian Lord would rend, 

And we've sworn an oath together 
That his reign of blood shall end. 

By the children he has slain, 
By the patience and the pain 

Of the Christ whose laws he tramples 
And whose word he takes in vain, 



By the God he dare not trust, 
We will curb his ruthless lust, 

Break his pride and -power for ever, 
Leave him humbled in the dust ! 

At his blighting nod or frown 
Church and cottage, thorpe and town 

Crash in ruin — and in ruin 
Shall his glory thus go down : 
We will match his mightiest guns, 
And outnumber all his Huns 

With our surely gathering millions, 
Freemen all, and Freemen's sons. 

Listen — listen ! Day and night, 
Through the dark and through the light 

From the homes of all the Empire 
Rolls the sea of England's might ; 
Hear its tide across the gloom, 
With a fateful surge and boom, 

Rising, rising still — and, risen, 
It shall sweep him to his doom. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Britain's Way 5 

I. THE CLOUD BURSTS II 

II. KITCHENER'S MEN - 26 

III. HEROES AND MARTYRS - - 38 

IV. " THE COLOSSAL BRITISH CALM " 61 
V. THE SOUL OF THE NATION - - 75 

VI. IN THE TRENCHES - - - 105 

VII. KEEPING THE GATES - - - 143 

VIII. FROM THE BRITAINS OVERSEAS - 160 

IX. SEEING IT THROUGH - - -182 

Epilogue - 192 



CHAPTER I 

The Cloud Bursts 

Stand 
Firm for your country, and become a man 
Honoured and loved ; it were a noble life 
To be found dead embracing her. 

Ben Jonson's Catiline. 

Already it seems years rather than months 
since we were living at peace with all the 
rest of the world and wrangling furiously 
among ourselves — wrangling so furiously, 
split into so many opposing sections, so 
fatally disunited, to all appearance, that 
a resolute, well-prepared enemy may be 
forgiven for expecting to find us an easy, 
almost helpless prey. To think of the 
condition into which we were fallen less 
than a year ago is like recalling a wild 
nightmare. The labour world was seeth- 
ing with discontent and bitter resentment 

against an unjust division of the fruits 

11 



12 The Cloud Bursts 

of our national prosperity that resulted in 
the disgraceful poverty of the too-poor 
and the equally disgraceful affluence of 
the too-rich. There had been rioting and 
shooting in South Africa, you remember, 
and the nine deported labour leaders exiled 
here among us had accentuated the ill- 
feeling, that was bad enough before they 
came, between employers and employed. 
There was trouble brewing in connection 
with those Indian emigrants (now said to 
have been dupes of German intrigue) who 
had been refused permission to land and 
settle in Canada. The suffragettes were 
desperately militant, burning houses and 
churches, breaking shop windows, damag- 
ing works of art, and revolting in prison 
to call attention to their demands. Another 
storm was raging round the question of 
Welsh Disestablishment. Ireland, apart 
from its own acute labour agitations, was 
an armed camp and apparently on the eve 
of revolution, with Ulstermen ready to fly 
at the throats of Nationalists, and officers 
of our army out there threatening to throw 
up their commissions sooner than obey 



The Cloud Bursts 13 

orders of which they did not approve. 
Even down to the end of last July gun- 
running was still going on in Dublin. 

At this moment, when all these and other 
social and political disputes at home and 
in our Colonies had us entangled in a very 
Gordian knot of difficulties — the enemy 
struck. And in a flash all our discords 
ended, and the whole British Empire, 
united as it never had been united before, 
rose out of chaos and stood four-square 
against the common danger. No wonder 
Germany was surprised ; we were a little 
surprised ourselves at the instant unanimity 
with which all our warring elements 
coalesced and, as at a sudden bugle-call, 
were gathered into a loyal and mighty 
brotherhood with a single determination 
shaping all its energies — a determination 
to fit itself swiftly and at any personal 
sacrifice to cope with and crush for ever 
the most ruthless, the most soulless renas- 
cence of barbarism that has ever threatened 
the peace and hopes of the civilised 
world. 

On July 28th; after a month of tortuous 



14 The Cloud Bursts 

and obscure diplomatic negotiation con- 
cerning the murder of the Austrian Crown 
Prince by a Serbian subject, Austria, under 
German influence, declared war upon Serbia, 
and so doing lit a fire that swept with 
terrible rapidity across Europe. The Czar, 
as the traditional protector of the Slav 
nations, had warned Austria that he would 
not stand by and see Serbia destroyed, 
so on August ist, Germany, ostensibly 
supporting her ally, declared war against 
Russia, and on the same day invaded 
Luxemburg, which is not on the road 
to Petrograd. On August 3rd, Germany 
invaded Belgium, and on the 4th declared 
war on Belgium and on France. On that 
same 4th Great Britain, fulfilling her treaty 
obligations, protested against the gross 
violation of Belgian neutrality and delivered 
an ultimatum that expired at midnight ; 
and since no answer was forthcoming, in 
the first hour of August 5th we declared 
war on Germany. 

It was this prompt and decisive action 
on the part of the British Government that 
upset Germany's, elaborate calculations, 



The Cloud Bursts 15 

falsified the pretentious forecasts of her 
academic military experts and bloody- 
minded professors ; and she hates and 
maligns us at this hour because we have 
spoilt her programme by not proving our- 
selves the fools and poltroons that her wise 
men and heroes had thought us. She had 
analysed our national character with that 
cocksure, philosophic solemnity which sen- 
sible people never take too seriously ; she 
had weighed our enormous Empire in a 
balance of her own making and found it 
wanting everywhere. Her oracles had 
assured her that whatever happened on 
the Continent, Great Britian would not go 
to war — she dare not, for her Empire was 
rent with internecine strife and tottering 
to its fall — India, a hot-bed of disaffection 
and yearning for an opportunity to rise 
and throw off our oppressive yoke : Canada, 
Australasia, South Africa, weary of their 
connection with us and certain to refuse to 
become anyway involved in a European 
war that might be our concern but could 
not be theirs : Ireland obviously ready and 
waiting for such a chance to strike for 



16 The Cloud Bursts 

independence and join with an enemy to 
crush us. All this looked so plausible and 
gratifying on paper that the complacent 
German people were convinced it was all 
true. There was nothing scientific about 
the construction of the British Empire ; 
and Germany is so materialistic nowadays 
that she has no faith in anything but brute 
force and scientific machinery ; it had 
grown slowly, unmethodically through the 
centuries like a mere thing of nature, whilst 
Germany had been clever enough to con- 
struct her own carefully systematised 
Empire in a matter of fifty years. Clearly, 
then, the British were no authentic Empire 
builders, had no scholarly, codified theory 
of government and their Empire must 
needs tumble to pieces at once before the 
intelligent onslaught of a race that had 
really studied and understood the business. 
We had no method, they argued ; our 
progress had been haphazard and acci- 
dental ; the different parts of our dominion 
were nothing but a disorderly mass of 
unorganised countries — instead of being 
forcibly and firmly clamped together under 



The Cloud Bursts 17 

a uniform, cast-iron rule, most of them 
made their own laws ; their relations with 
us were purely voluntary ; England had no 
power to compel them to obey her, and was 
it likely that such free peoples, failing to 
consult their own safety, would go forth 
voluntarily to spend their blood and money 
in assisting to maintain an Empire that 
did not hold them in subjection, had never 
bridled and harnessed them to its triumphal 
chariot, and so, from the German point 
of view, was an Empire in name only ? As 
for the homeland itself, it was contempt- 
ibly degenerate and effete, altogether given 
over to a childish love of sport, to comfort 
and luxury, to a narrow, unidealistic com- 
mercial greed that made it more than ever 
a nation of shopkeepers, so pusillanimous, 
so shop-soiled, so wedded to peace at any 
price that it would sacrifice anything except 
its own skin and its own cash sooner than 
allow its Government to become involved in 
a Continental war. It seems a muddled 
sort of reasoning, for neither a love of 
sport nor commercial greed is compatible 
with soft living, but these were their 



18 The Cloud Bursts 

convictions, this is what their spuriously 
subtle wiseacres thought they knew about 
us. 

I only know that after our ultimatum 
had gone to Germany, throughout August 
4th, which was a Bank holiday, the one 
feeling in our London holiday crowd and, 
as we afterwards learned, throughout the 
kingdom, was a fear — not that we should 
go to war, but lest our and Germany's 
diplomatists might so shuffle the dirty cards 
that we should not. There was a strong 
sentiment that the entente with France, of 
itself, ought to leave us no choice ; but, 
above all, a deep indignation against the 
invasion of Belgium fired us with an 
intense desire to fulfil a duty made thus 
doubly clear and imperative. At the root 
of it, this fear was a consuming anxiety lest 
a pacifist policy of non-intervention should 
prevail ; lest Germany should offer us 
pledges that might justify us, on diplo- 
matic grounds, in standing aside from the 
conflict, but must on every other ground 
brand us with dishonour. 

It was this feeling that fretted the multi- 



The Cloud Bursts 19 

tude that gathered and overflowed White- 
hall and all its tributaries late at night on 
August 4th, and waited impatiently until 
Big Ben struck twelve. Then there was 
some cheering ; then a strange, expectant 
silence. They were waiting for the news ; 
and another half hour was not past before it 
came. It ran through the dense crowd in 
a moment that war had been declared on 
Germany, and it was greeted everywhere 
with a sense of profound relief and satis- 
faction. The cheers that stormed up thun- 
derously thrilled you with a certainty that 
this vast crowd spoke for the nation its 
pride and its thankfulness that our people 
had in this supreme crisis stood firm and, 
without hesitation and fearlessly, done the 
only right thing in the only right way. 
Cheer after cheer rose almost frantically, 
it was so good to be freed of the almost 
intolerable tension of suspense ; then, as 
by a common impulse, hats where whipped 
off and, standing bareheaded, those exultant 
thousands lifted their voices first in the 
National Anthem, then in the stirring 
strains of the Marseillaise. There was no 



20 The Cloud Bursts 

mafficking ; no rowdyism ; for this was a 
crowd sanely and deeply in earnest. Still 
cheering, it broke up and went its ways, 
neither boasting nor fearing, but merely 
glad from the heart of it that we had thrown 
down the gage to a braggart, arrogant 
race whose squalid, out-of-date religion of 
bloodshed and conquest was a challenge 
and an abomination to all decent, civilised 
human beings. 

Next day, Lord Kitchener succeeded 
Mr. Asquith as Minister of War, and whilst 
we were preparing swiftly and in a most 
practical, resolute spirit to enter upon our 
share of the greatest war that had ever 
fallen to our hands, tidings came that 
Canada, Australia, New Zealand were en- 
thusiastically raising and equipping troops 
that were to come and join our battle line ; 
that the warrior Princes of India were 
eagerly placing themselves and their armies 
at our service and petitioning to be sent 
to the front ; that South Africa would 
relieve us of garrison duties, raise troops 
for her own defence, make war on Germany's 
South African colonies and undertake to 



The Cloud Bursts 21 

suppress any outbreak of the rebellion 
that Germany had been fomenting among 
a certain small section of the Boer-British 
community. And at home here, no sooner 
did Lord Kitchener call for a new volunteer 
army than men of every class, rich and 
poor, clerk and docker, the town or country 
aristocrat with the swineherd and the 
bricklayer, went swarming in thousands to 
the recruiting stations all over the kingdom. 
Some of the newspapers chattered 
shrewdly about capturing German trade, 
but no such ambition as that could have 
inspired a man among us to take up arms. 
It was a flaming anger against the unpro- 
voked wrongs inflicted upon Belgium, a 
spontaneous sympathy with France, 
threatened by a cunning, calculating aggres- 
sor whose avowed intention was to break 
and humble her so utterly that she should 
never again be able to lift her head from the 
dust — it was these things, far more even 
than any thought of the danger that 
threatened our own shores and our exist- 
ence as a nation, that appealed irresistibly, 
transformed as by magic our men of peace 



22 The Cloud Bursts 

into men of war and sent them to Whitehall 
and the other recruiting depots in such 
enormous numbers that many of them had 
to return there two and three days in 
succession to take their places again in the 
long queues, before they were able to get 
in at the doors to be examined and passed 
for service. 

One could not witness these things then, 
and cannot recall them now without some 
touch of pride and emotion. None of those 
men were unwilling conscripts, blind ser- 
vants of a tyrannical system : they were 
free men who knew why and for what they 
were to fight and were giving themselves 
to their country's cause because they felt 
it was a cause that was good enough to 
live for, or to die for. 

In the very early days of all this I met 
with an old friend who had been a most 
pronounced pacifist, an uncompromising 
denunciator of all wars and of those who 
made them ; but now, he had sacrificed 
a lucrative appointment, cast off his civilian 
tall hat and morning coat, and walked clad 
in khaki, keen and alert to fit himself to be 



The Cloud Bursts 23 

sent out quickly to the front as a private 
soldier. 

" Yes," he said, guessing at my surprise, 
" but this is not war in the usual sense of 
the word. I'm out to fight for peace ; 
that's all. There can be no peace in the 
world so long as a nation so brutally militant 
as Germany sits in the middle of it hungry 
for conquests and forcing all its neighbours 
to live under arms in self-defence. It's 
a stupid state of things that can't be 
tolerated at this time of day. It has 
simply got to be ended, and it can only 
be ended by smashing Germany, so for 
the sake of peace I'm going to war. I have 
been sick for years of the big armament 
savagery and seeing all Europe showing 
its teeth. If Bernhardi's gospel of murder 
and silly swaggering domination is good 
enough to fight for, well, I reckon the sane 
gospel of peace is too good to be given up 
till we've had one last hard fight for it. 
So far as I'm concerned the war is just 
a horrible necessity — it's a war to end war, 
and that's why I'm in it." 

In those early days, too, when the Kaiser 



24 The Cloud Bursts 

was still telling us clamorously that God 
was his old ally and sure to give him victory 
over his enemies, I happened to pay a 
visit to a kindly, gentle old lady who holds 
strict and quite orthodox views in all 
matters of religion. 

"Strange," I remarked to her, "that 
while the papers are full of tales of German 
atrocities the Kaiser still seems to think that 
God is with him and will reward him for all 
he is doing." 

"I do not trouble about what the 
Kaiser thinks of God," she said quietly. 
" We know what God thinks of the 
Kaiser." 

I was rather taken aback, but, without 
noticing this, she opened the Bible that lay 
on the table beside her, turned to the sixth 
chapter of Proverbs, and read out, with a 
glance up at the end of each verse to see 
that I caught its significance : 

" These six things doth the Lord hate ; 
yea, seven are an abomination unto 
him : 

" A proud look, a lying tongue, and 
hands that shed innocent blood : 



The Cloud Bursts 25 

" An heart that deviseth wicked imagina- 
tions, feet that be swift in running to 
mischief : 

" A false witness that speaketh lies, and 
he that soweth discord among brethren." 

She shut the book. 

" Now," she asked emphatically, " is 
there more than one king among those that 
are righting who need tremble when he reads 
those words ? " 



CHAPTER II 

Kitchener's Men 

" Come ye, whate'er your creed — waken all. 
Whate'er your temper, at your Country's call, 
Resolving (this a free-born Nation can) 
To have one soul, and perish to a man 
Or save this honoured land from every lord 
But British reason and the British sword." 

Wordsworth. 

Somebody just behind me in the crowd 
remarked, " It's wonderful when you come 
to think of it ! " and I guessed what he 
meant. 

We were standing on the pavement in 
Queen Victoria Street watching a few 
hundreds of Kitchener's new soldiers march- 
ing past in the roadway ; smart well-set-up 
fellows in khaki, keeping step with that 
keen, buoyant look men have when they 
are doing something they are able to put 
their hearts into. 

26 



Kitchener's Men 27 

The wonder was that until a week or 
two ago most of these men had never so 
much as dreamt of ever handling a gun. 
They were placidly serving behind counters, 
writing at desks in quiet offices, teaching 
in schools ; they were factory hands, farm 
labourers, or idle young men of means 
lounging through an easy life about town. 
For the strength of Kitchener's army 
is that it is a real democratic force, a 
people's army in the actual sense of the 
term. Every grade of society is repre- 
sented in its ranks, from navvies to univer- 
sity professors, from costermongers to the 
younger sons of peers. 

And, on second thoughts, it was no such 
wonder, after all, that our men of peace 
should have been so swiftly transformed 
into enthusiastic and capable men of war. 
Our German enemy never made a worse 
mistake than when he complacently as- 
sumed that because we were not an aggres- 
sively military nation, because soldiering 
was not a universal business with us, 
therefore we must needs be weak degener- 
ates with no fighting spirit left in us ; 



28 Kitchener's Men 

that merely because we were not always 
showing our teeth we did not possess any. 

Germany's military scientists, who know 
so much more of machinery than of men, 
appear to have convinced themselves that 
the fighting spirit was something which 
kindled under a brass helmet and was 
extinguished by a top-hat ; and that when 
they had counted the numbers of our 
professional soldiers they had counted all 
that mattered of our fighting men. 

Well, in less than twelve weeks after 
he had called for a new army of a million, 
over eight hundred thousand had responded 
eagerly to Lord Kitchener's appeal, and 
by now there are already some two million 
who are proud to be known as " Kitchener's 
men." And this great force is made of far 
finer, more reliable stuff than if he had 
raised it by conscription, for there is no 
leaven of unwilling or constitutionally un- 
military material in it. Each one of these 
men has his own good reason for what he 
is doing : he knows why he has joined, 
what he is going to fight for, and goes gladly 
and ardently to fight for it. 



Kitchener's Men 29 

Take, for instance, a man in my own 
neighbourhood, who enlisted almost as 
soon as Kitchener's call to arms appeared 
on the hoardings. He is a grocer in a 
small way, a steady, decent, hard-working 
fellow with so little of swagger or dash 
about him that once I should have said 
there was not an ounce of the warrior in his 
blood ; but now I know better. I met 
him in his khaki, a month after he had 
enlisted, when he was home on a week- 
end leave ; and he was looking as perfect 
a soldier as any I have seen. At first 
he was a little diffident and awkward in 
accounting for himself, for even in normal 
times he was one of the reticent kind. I 
could get no more from him than that he 
had felt it was up to him to go, the same 
as anybody else ; that he didn't care to 
stick at home and let somebody else go 
and fight for him, he just wanted to do 
his share ; then, suddenly, he broke out : 

" Look here — it's like this. My wife 
can manage the shop all right till I come 
back, and — well, look here, you know 
what's happened in Belgium, and do you 



30 Kitchener's Men 

think I want to risk having to see my 
kiddies grow up under this sanguinary- 
Kaiser ? Well, there you are — and it isn't 
going to be my fault if ever they have to." 

Feelings of that sort have prompted a good 
many of the volunteers who have shouldered 
a gun and gone to the front, or are presently 
going. 

I know of another, a Sussex labourer. 
He did not join quite early in the day, only 
because his wife begged him not to. But 
he read the papers restlessly, and it was 
the stories of German atrocities that roused 
him so and were more than he could endure. 
They tell me he was fond of children, and 
a little grave in the village churchyard 
held the only one that had been his own. 
One evening he came in from work and put 
the newspaper down before his wife and 
showed her a report of how a party of 
Uhlans had ruthlessly butchered a Belgian 
mother and three children. 

" Read that," he said, terribly moved. 
" It's no use, lass — I must go — I must go. 
I can't stand any more of it — I must go." 

She read, and so far from opposing him 



Kitchener's Men 31 

further agreed that he must. She still did 
not want him to go, but she was convinced 
that he must and, weeping bitterly, walked 
with him to the station — and he went. 

When I go over the long roll call of my 
personal friends who have enlisted I grow 
ashamed of the causes that keep me still 
at home, though I am prouder than ever 
of the country that is mine, of the race to 
which I belong. Some went, maybe, from 
a gallant love of adventure ; many, as I 
know, because being qualified by age and 
circumstances, they were bound in honour 
to go, this fight being what it is — for our 
common human right of freedom, and 
against the most stupid and most merciless 
tyranny that ever sought to throw civilisa- 
tion into the melting-pot and revive the 
brute-glories of a primeval day. It may 
be needless to praise those who are merely 
doing their duty in face of this general 
peril, but one cannot but have admiration, 
and something more than admiration, for 
the many that march beside them who 
were under no such obligation to go. 

One of these is a man of forty-six, who 



32 Kitchener's Men 

has spent his time and money in a long 
struggle to make headway in his profession. 
He is an accomplished violinist, and at 
last seemed to have come within sight of 
the goal he had striven so strenuously to 
reach. In the last five years or so he had 
toured successfully through the country, and 
has had engagements at some of London's 
largest halls. But he happened to have 
studied under a famous teacher in Paris, 
and at the outbreak of the war his sympathy 
and affection for the French people pulled 
him — the thought of their being trampled 
into the dust under German hoofs became 
intolerable to him. He had everything 
to lose and nothing whatever to gain by 
putting his sympathies into action, never- 
theless he promptly flung his profession 
to the winds, turned his back on his private 
hopes and ambitions, and offered himself 
for enlistment. 

At the recruiting station he gave his 
age as thirty-four. He is physically fit, 
but he scarcely looks so young, and the 
officer at the table eyed him critically, and 
asked : 



Kitchener's Men 33 

" What particular branch of the service 
do you want to join ? " 

" Any that will have me/' said he. 

" That's good— thank God for that ! " 
said the officer, with emphasis. " So many 
insist on joining special regiments, and 
that often makes difficulties. But you're 
the man for us. We'll find room for you." 

And they did. 

Another was an expert mechanic ; he 
has had experience in the building of aero- 
planes, and has flown in them as an assistant. 
He is over fifty, but the spirit moved him, 
and he offered himself to a flying corps, 
giving his age as forty. He would have 
risked being younger if he had not been 
grey-haired. 

" You are as right as rain," said the 
doctor who examined him ; " your con- 
stitution is not more than thirty-five, and 
there are so many applications that the 
younger men stand the best chance." 

So when he reached the military authori- 
ties he was careful to adopt the age of his 
constitution. 

" I daresay I can put you through," 



34 Kitchener's Men 

observed the officer, " but of course our 
people are taking the younger men first. 
" If you had not been more than thirty, 
now " 

"As a matter of fact," interrupted the 
recruit, " I am thirty, but as I am a bit 
grey I thought you might not believe me 
if I said so." 

" Oh, I believe you," laughed the officer. 
" You tell the truth and stick to your right 
age if you want to get through quick." 

And as he got through at once you may 
depend that he stuck to it. 

" But," he confessed to some of us after- 
wards, " I hope to goodness they won't 
go on expecting me to take much more off, 
or I shan't be born presently." 

But somehow, I think, perhaps the recol- 
lection of this kind that touches me most 
poignantly is one of a certain old gentleman 
of private means who enjoyed all the com- 
forts of life in a pleasant house of his own 
some forty miles to the north of London. 
Shortly after Kitchener asked for his new 
army, a large number of troops were in 
training on the common that stretches 



Kitchener's Men 35 

within sight of his door, and one morning 
he walked into camp to interview the 
Colonel in command. He and the Colonel 
were old friends ; they had played golf 
together in piping times of peace, and 
more than once he had carried the Colonel 
with him on his yearly caravanning holidays. 
Tall, thin, full of energy, he is a sturdy 
man still, though he is nearer seventy than 
sixty, 

" I have come, Colonel," he said quietly, 
" to offer my services. Now, wait a minute 
— listen to me. I am not so mad as to 
ask you to help me, at my age, to get 
a commission, or even to imagine they 
would pass me anywhere to serve in the 
ranks. I would do it if they would, but 
they won't. Still, you know, I'm a capital 
cook — I haven't gone caravanning for 
nothing — so I want you to arrange to take 
me into one of your battalions as cook." 

They tell me the Colonel stared at him 
for a minute, and was oddly moved. 

" My dear old chap," he said, " do 
you know what you are asking for ? You 
would have nothing but the damn'dest hard. 



36 Kitchener's Men 

dirty work, and no possible chance of any- 
kind of honour or distinction at all." 

" I know that," said the game old 
gentleman obstinately. " I don't care about 
that. But do you think I'm just going to 
sit at home like this all the while ? I can't 
do it — I won't do it. I am determined 
to do my bit in this business somehow, 
and I'm asking you as a friend to give 
me the only job I'm fit for, and I shan't 
die happy if you don't let me have this 
chance." 

There was no dissuading him ; within 
a week he might have been seen, smart 
and active, swathed in an apron, cooking 
for those troops out on that Buckingham- 
shire common, and he has since gone 
joyously to the front with them to cook 
for them there. 

Almost everyone you meet now can tell 
you such tales of our countrymen — of 
the gallant, self-sacrificing spirit in which 
old and young alike have risen to the great 
occasion and made haste to meet the German 
challenge. And this is the people that our 
enemy had fatuously written down as 



Kitchener's Men 37 

degenerate and negligible. If I were to 
say all I think in my heart of these and 
many other such incidents I might seem 
to be talking boastfully, foolishly. But I 
have not gone about in these latter days, 
mixing with all sorts and conditions of my 
fellows, without being made to feel that the 
old fighting spirit which built up our 
Empire is not dead in us or even asleep. 
It is alive and alert and as ready to answer 
any good call that is made on it as it was 
when Shakespeare felt it gloriously astir 
in the air of his time and wrote exultantly : 

' ' This England never did and never shall 
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror." 



CHAPTER III 

Heroes and Martyrs 

" They were heroic souls who had lain life's all 
On Freedom's hungry altar." 

Gerald Massey. 

I remember being told when I was a boy, 
by a man who spoke as if he knew, that 
the French are a very gallant people, 
but emotional ; and that much the same 
might be said of the Italians. I gathered 
from him that to be emotional is not exactly 
anything to their discredit ; it is a national 
characteristic and we have no right to 
blame them for it — they are born like that 
and are unable to hide their weakness. On 
the other hand, he gave me to understand 
that we Britons are made of much sterner 
stuff ; are not given to sentiment at all, 
and, though we have the best kind of human 
feelings, we are a proud, self-controlled 
race and never reveal them in public. Of 

38 



Heroes and Martyrs 39 

course, it is nothing to boast of — this 
dignified reticence — it just happens to be a 
national characteristic of ours, and no 
more. 

I doubt whether I should ever have found 
this fact out for myself. I accepted his 
word for it because he appeared to be so 
well informed. But ever since Belgian 
refugees began to come over to England, 
and ever since we have had Belgian 
wounded soldiers in our midst, I have 
been exercised with a growing suspicion 
that perhaps he may have been mis- 
taken. 

Naturally, we were bound to feel sorry 
for the martyred Belgian people assailed 
by a dishonourable, barbarous enemy and 
ruthlessly driven out of their ruined towns 
and villages, Naturally we could not help 
admiring and honouring the indomitable 
heroism of the Belgian soldiers. I say 
nothing against that ; but I keep coming 
across English men and women who break 
all such bounds and go enthusiastically 
beyond them, and somehow it does not 
seem fair to that national characteristic 



40 Heroes and Martyrs 

which serious students of psychology have 
for so long attributed to us. 

That my tailor should have failed in 
this respect does not matter so much ; one 
does not look for stoicism in a tailor ; 
besides, he never even mentioned the 
matter until I chanced to speak of the war 
whilst we were trying the coat on. Then 
he agreed that it was terrible, and added 
quite casually — much as he might have 
referred to the acquisition of a new fashion 
in waistcoats — that he and his wife had 
arranged to adopt a little Belgian boy and 
girl, whose parents had been butchered, 
and intended to bring them up with their 
own children. He made a few more chalk 
marks where the coat did not fit nicely on 
the shoulders, and that was all we said 
about it. And I was rather pleased that 
we both knew how to behave ourselves so 
properly. 

But I can't say so much for that police- 
man at Charing Cross. You may have read 
the story in the papers at the time. Soon 
after the sack of Louvain, sixteen Belgian 
refugees, mostly old folks and weary child- 



Heroes and Martyrs 41 

ren, arrived at the station towards midnight, 
when he was going off duty. He contrived 
to make out who they were, and as it was 
then too late to take them to the Belgian 
Consul, he carried the smallest child in his 
arms and shepherded the rest of the 
forlorn party to his own home. He and 
his wife fed them, gave up their bed to two, 
and manufactured beds for the others in 
their sitting-room and kitchen. In the 
morning, after a good breakfast, the police- 
man took them all by bus to the Belgian 
Consulate. Meanwhile, the refugees had 
made a private collection among themselves, 
but when one of them at parting offered 
him the money, I understand that he 
laughed and waved it aside with a large 
official gesture and would have none of it 
— would even have gone off abruptly with- 
out so much as letting them thank him 
only they went after him ; and, after all, 
it was not his fault that they were in tears, 
nor that some of them insisted on kissing 
the hand that had been kind to them. 

But there was another thing that I 
witnessed myself. Some weeks later, after 



42 Heroes and Martyrs 

committees had been formed to take care 
of these wanderers whom the modern Huns 
have left homeless, two shabby women, 
an old and a young one, with two bewildered 
little girls were in the centre of a question- 
ing, well-meaning crowd at the corner of 
Kingsway, but nobody in the crowd could 
understand what they were saying. Sud- 
denly a passing carriage was checked and 
drew up at the kerb, an elegant young lady, 
who had noticed them, stepped out briskly, 
pushed through, spoke to the poor women 
in their own language, and, taking an arm 
of the elder one and a hand of one of the 
children, walked with them a hundred 
yards or so and led them into the Belgian 
Refugee Committee Room that was near 
by. Two cheerful girls came forward to 
meet them in the vestibule, as if they had 
been waiting their arrival, and in a couple 
of minutes, without wasting any time 
on formalities, had them seated at a table 
with a pleasant array of bread and butter 
and cakes and cups-and-saucers and tea set 
out on the cloth before them. The two 
children started at once to eat ravenously, 



Heroes and Martyrs 43 

and if the two sad women delayed and cried 
a little first, you may be sure it was not 
entirely because of the trouble through 
which they had come. 

Nevertheless, I did not think our national 
characteristic came out quite strongly on 
that occasion. And, if I am to tell the 
truth, it gets very badly shaken whenever 
we happen to come upon a Belgian soldier 
in the streets. Some of us may pretend 
not to look at him, but as a matter of fact 
we can't help looking at him, and you will 
see a good many of us turn and stand to 
gaze back at him after he has gone past. 
One day two of those soldiers, one of them 
limping slightly, were strolling along Fen- 
church Street, and these eyes beheld an 
Englishman, a weedy, poor fellow who 
might have been a carpenter, pass them 
staring intently, and then turn impetuously 
and hurry back and get in front of them and 
snatch off his cap and wave it, crying 
" Vive Belgium ! " with tears running down 
his cheeks. Even that did not altogether 
satisfy him ; he stood there saying foolish, 
friendly things to them in English which 



44 Heroes and Martyrs 

they evidently did not understand, and still 
with his hat off he shook hands with them 
both, and they smiled and seemed pleased, 
though they had to answer him awkwardly, 
in a language that was as incomprehensible 
to him as his was to them. And somehow 
I was pleased too. I admit I was a bit 
ashamed of him, but I thoroughly approved 
of what he had done and felt that, for the 
moment, he was the delegate of the whole 
street. 

Again — last Lord Mayor's Day I did not 
go out to see the Show ; it is our habit to 
affect indifference towards that ancient 
institution ; but being out I was caught 
by sheer accident in the thick of the crowd 
on Ludgate Hill. I was crushed at the 
back of it, and could see nothing but heads 
and the tops of bayonets as the procession 
went by. But exactly opposite, on the 
other side of the way, four wounded Belgians 
with a couple of Red Cross nurses sat in a 
window to themselves, and I and that part 
of the mob which was packed beside and 
behind me were contented to be able to 
watch how they were enjoying it. Some 



Heroes and Martyrs 45 

of those behind me were continually talking 
of them, of their heroism, their misfortune, 
the brutality of the German enemy, or 
calling attention to the eagerness with which 
all four leaned forward with their faces 
against the glass to find out what was 
coming next, when there was a break in 
the procession ; but when, all of a sudden, 
the four Belgians rose spontaneously, one 
with his head in bandages, and, each 
lifting a hand, stood at the salute whilst 
the Lord Mayor's fairy-coach was passing, 
nobody talked — nobody said a word ; and 
I believe I understood why, for just then 
I doubt if I could have said a word myself. 
Somewhere about that same date, when 
I was setting out for the city one morning 
I found the gates at the level crossing closed 
rather sooner than usual ; boys and girls 
were perched on the top of them, and a 
vast, motley crowd was surging alertly 
round, waiting to see the train go by. 
Another crowd overflowed the booking- 
office of the station. Whilst I was wrig- 
gling and pushing a way through, a crisp 
bugle-call rang out, and when I contrived 



46 Heroes and Martyrs 

to reach the platform I found that all the 
excitement centred on a contingent of some 
hundred Belgian soldiers who were en 
route for London. 

Presently the train came steaming in, and 
to roar upon roar of cheering the Belgians 
boarded it. I scrambled in where I could, 
and so came to share a carriage with five of 
them, one being, to my particular gratifica- 
tion, the bugler. 

They did not possess a complete uniform 
between them — these five. One wore the 
khaki cap of a British infantryman ; the 
others had tweed caps of a civilian fashion ; 
their trousers and mufflers were glaringly 
unmilitary ; but they were all as cheerful 
and high-spirited as if they were going on a 
picnic instead of back into the firing line. 
They were too much occupied at the 
moment to pay any attention to me, and 
I only found out where they were going 
and something about them when we were 
well advanced on our journey. It was 
not till then, when we had become calm 
enough to converse in such broken language 
as we could manage, that they told me they 



Heroes and Martyrs 47 

had all been wounded, and been in hospital 
at Dollis Hill, but for the last fortnight had 
been recuperating in my own neighbourhood 
on the skirts of a small fishing town near 
the mouth of the Thames. And you might 
gather some notion of the number of friends 
they had made in that fortnight from the 
swarm of people that had come to-day to 
see them off. There were girls and boys 
and old men who had tramped in from 
villages three miles away on purpose to 
give them a last good-bye. 

The bugler and another stood at the 
window on my side of the carriage ; the 
other three made the most of the window 
opposite. When the train started the 
cheering, which had never ceased since it 
came in, swelled to a deafening volume. 
First a porter, then girls and men from the 
general throng darted forward for a shake 
of the eager hands held out to them ; 
the bugler, who was blowing gloriously all 
the while, keeping one hand free for this 
friendly use. We swept in triumph be- 
tween the gates of the crossing, and some- 
thing in the sunlit air, the heartfelt cheers, 



48 Heroes and Martyrs 

the waving hands, hats and handkerchiefs 
stirred your blood even more than the 
ringing call of the bugle did. 

The lane that runs for some distance 
beside the line was packed with fishermen, 
labourers who had dodged out from the 
gas works there, women and girls and 
children ; there were people leaning from 
upper windows, or dashing out hurriedly 
into little back yards, and everywhere was 
the flutter of hands and the mingling treble 
and roar of human voices. And the soldiers 
cheered back as heartily, and the bugler blew 
and blew and blew till the last of the crowd 
was left out of sight behind. 

Then the two soldiers at my window sat 
down, looking at me and laughing apolo- 
getically, as it were, for their excitement. 
One drew in from the other window, a 
grave, stolid man, who smoked thereafter 
and scarcely uttered a word throughout the 
journey ; but the remaining two, keen 
vivacious boys of twenty, still stood gazing 
out over the country. 

The man who sat facing me was a homely, 
rural-looking fellow of thirty or so ; the 



Heroes and Martyrs 49 

bugler, who made his seat alongside me, 
was younger. It was the homely man 
who spoke first. He nodded to me again, 
smiled and winked in that odd, apologetic 
way, and said, as explaining their be- 
haviour : 

" Ah, ye-es, everybody so kind." 

" You are going back to the Front ? " 
I suggested, with a view to developing 
conversation. 

" The Front ! " cried the bugler, catching 
at the familiar word. " Yah ! To Paree — 
then the Front." 

" The Front ! The Front ! " chuckled 
the homely man, pleased to give me a 
word that we both understood. Then he 
raised an imaginary rifle to his shoulder, 
tilted his head, closed one eye, as taking 
aim at a mark, and added, still chuckling, 
"Der Kaiser! Der Kaiser!" 

Thereupon our talk became as miscel- 
laneous as our linguistic difficulties would 
allow. The bugler showed me an address 
on an envelope to inform me of his name 
and indicate the whereabouts of the hospital 
where their wounds had been nursed ; then 



50 Heroes and Martyrs 

he reached down a bundle from the rack, 
took out a gigantic cigar-box and opened 
it to show me his treasures — a bundle of 
picture postcards, three cigars, several 
packets of cigarettes, some chocolate, a 
small knitted purse, which he picked out 
and held towards me in his palm, with a 
droll, roguish twinkle in his eyes. 

After insisting on my testing one of the 
cigarettes, he put these away ; then pro- 
duced from his pocket an album of patriotic 
songs, words and music ; probably another 
present ; and turning the leaves, struck 
up the Marseillaise, the homely man joining 
lustily in the tune, and the stolid one 
removing his pipe to help with the chorus. 
They sang the Belgian National Anthem ; 
then the Russian ; then " lah-lah'd " the 
English, giving " Send him victorious," 
and " God save the King " in my own 
tongue with great gusto, glancing at me 
to see that I recognised the words. 

At intervals, one of the two boys, who 
were not yet able to tear themselves away 
from the window, would turn to shout 
eagerly and beckon, and on the instant 



Heroes and Martyrs 51 

the bugler would leap up, squeeze in between 
them and blow a resounding blast, which 
would move some men who were working 
far off in the fields to straighten their 
backs and look round, and when they saw 
the heads that must have been protruding 
from most of the carriages of the train, 
they would snatch off their hats and you 
could see they were cheering madly, though 
you could not hear a sound of it. Some- 
times, half a mile away, they would 
start running in a frantic endeavour to 
keep pace with the train, waving and 
cheering, till we had hopelessly outstripped 
them. 

By and by, when all the district they 
knew and that had known them was left 
well in the rear, the two boys reluctantly 
pulled their heads in. One dropped into 
his seat resignedly and lit a cigarette. 
The other, a bright-faced, good-looking 
youngster, hesitated a minute ; then seeing 
me in my corner, the only Englishman 
present, he suddenly threw out his hands 
towards me with a curious, impulsive, 
appealing gesture, and cried : 



52 Heroes and Martyrs 

" I go — ah, yes, I go — and I lose my 
second Motherland ! " 

And sat down abruptly, and covered 
his face with his hands. 

His comrades shot a shamefaced glance 
at me and at each other, and then began 
to laugh quietly. I can't describe what 
a sort of kindness and good humour was 
in that laughter of theirs. And first the 
bugler, then the others took out handker- 
chiefs, or substitutes for them — one was 
obviously a blue checked duster ; one was a 
miniature Union Jack — and made burlesque 
pretences of weeping. They nudged the 
boy and, calling to him in their own 
language, persisted in pressing the loan 
of their handkerchiefs upon him, till he 
straightened up quickly and, with a swift 
glance round, laughed back as gaily as 
any of them ; but they were real tears that 
were shining in his eyes. 

Two stations beyond mine we have a large 
hospital which is crowded with British, 
French and Belgian soldiers who have been 
broken in the war ; and on another morn- 
ing when I got into the train to go to 



Heroes and Martyrs 53 

London there was a Belgian in the now 
familiar blue uniform, though then it was 
still strange to most of us, seated in the 
carriage. He carried his right arm in a 
sling, and had a corner next the door. 
Beside him sat a large, expansive English- 
man in a tall hat and a frock coat ; a man 
of a loud, rolling voice and a complacent, 
rather pompous manner. He was talking 
when I got in, and he continued talking, 
with the rarest intervals of silence after 
he had asked a question, but even then 
he did not pause long enough to obtain 
an answer. Sometimes he used a French 
word or two, by way of intimating that 
he could converse in that tongue if he 
thought it desirable to do so, but for the 
most part he compromised by orating in 
the kind of broken English that foreigners 
employ and so may be considered to find 
more comprehensible ; and the soldier 
listened and nodded and smiled with 
unfailing politeness and amiability. 

" The mistake — mee-stake — you Belgians 
made was," said the expansive man in the 
friendliest style, emphasising the important 



54 Heroes and Martyrs 

words by shouting them louder, " in trying 
to hold those forts at Liege. My dear sir, 
forts are no good against modern artillery. 
No, no. Non, non. No good. But it 
was brave, mind you ! — it was noble — 
no-bell. It was hero-ic. But," he closed 
his eyes, shook his head slowly and flour- 
ished his hands, " it was attempting the 
impossible — ze impossi-bell ! Now, when 
you knew the Germans were coming to 
attack Liege, my advice to you would have 
been this. ..." 

Whilst he unfolded his advice confi- 
dently and at great length, I noticed how 
the squat, sturdy old man who sat next 
to me was glaring across at the Belgian 
with a peculiar expression of vindictiveness. 
From his appearance, I should have guessed 
him to be a labourer of some kind : his 
hands were rough and knotty, his clothes 
and his cloth cap the worse for wear, his 
face was seamed with wrinkles, and he 
had a stiff tuft of grey beard that thrust 
forward aggressively from under his chin. 
His look was so darkly malevolent that I 
could not help watching him, puzzled ; 



Heroes and Martyrs 55 

I fancy he was confused by the talk of the 
expansive Englishman and, catching only 
his louder, broken English, took him, also, 
to be some kind of foreigner ; and presently 
he seemed to feel that I was regarding him, 
and our glances met. 

" What's he doin' here ? " he demanded 
huskily, leaning towards me and signalling 
at the Belgian with a flick of his eyelid. 
" No right to allow these wounded Germans 
to run round loose like this." 

I explained matters in an undertone, 
and his face cleared, and softened curiously. 

" I thought they was a pair of them 
Germans what ought to be kept locked up 
like the papers complains about," he 
growled. " Belgian soldier, is he — that 
one ? " 

He fixed his eyes on the wounded man, 
and there was a new, strange light in them. 

" My son's out there," he went on growl- 
ing to me presently. " We had a letter 
from him only the other day. My missis 
read it out to me — my eyes are no good — 
and he said in the letter these Belgians, 
he says, they're the right stuff. He says 



56 Heroes and Martyrs 

his regiment would have been all cut up 
by the Germans if some Belgians hadn't 
come up in time to help them ; they were 
good pals and stood by them, he says, and 
if ever you meet any of 'em over here, 
he says, don't you forgit it but do what 
you can for 'em. Some of 'em died for us 
chaps, he says, and don't you forgit 
it." 

He fell silent, and stared, as if he could 
not take his eyes from that Belgian's face. 
Once he made as if to lean forward and 
speak to him, but he drew back as quickly, 
perhaps from some feeling of shyness, 
perhaps only because the soldier was too 
completely absorbed by the overpowering 
attentions of the tall-hatted gentleman 
to have any chance of noticing him. 

" You are going to Hampstead ? To 
visit a wounded friend ? Yes, yes. Oui, 
oui, m'sieu. Good ! " the tall-hatted 
gentleman was saying. " Now, Hampstead 
is a long way. Have you ever been there 
before ? . . . No, you haven't. Well, well, 
well. Then, of course, you don't know 
how to get there. Let me see if I can 



Heroes and Martyrs 57 

explain to you which is the best and 
quickest route." 

He proceeded to elaborate and minute 
explanations, and concluded them with, 
" When you get to the Hampstead station 
you will have a longish walk — von long 
valk, you understand — to the address you 
want. But it's a pretty straight road. 
You will have no difficulty ; " and he 
proceeded to impress upon him the names 
of the thoroughfares he must traverse, 
and the right and left turnings he must 
take. 

" How can he understand all that jaw 
about the roads he's got to take ? He 
couldn't remember it if he did," the old 
man breathed scornfully in my ear. " And 
he don't look equal to no long walks. Why, 
I reckon he's only just up out o' bed." 

He sat brooding darkly, still with his 
eyes feasting on the Belgian. By-and-by, 
he furtively fumbled in his pocket, brought 
out his money and appeared to be covertly 
counting it. I grew hot and uncomfortable, 
fearing he was thinking of offering a trifle 
to the soldier, who looked better off than 



58 Heroes and Martyrs 

himself, and was relieved when he put it 
back without doing so. 

Before we reached the terminus the tall- 
hatted gentleman had repeated his direc- 
tions several times, and when we got out 
he grasped the Belgian by the arm in a 
masterful manner and led him off ahead of 
us. I overtook them downstairs in the 
doorway, where he was telling his protege 
which way he must go in order to reach 
the station whence he could book to 
Hampstead. 

" Now, if you are not quite sure you can 
find it," he concluded, " say so, and I'll 
come along with you and show you where 
it is." 

" No, no," cried the Belgian anxiously. 
" Tank you, tank you, but I find him 
easy, quite well. Yes. Tank you. Tank 
you." 

" Very well, very well. You can't miss 
it. I am delighted to have met you. 
Good-bye." And to my surprise he not 
only shook hands again but he raised his 
hat and added a boisterous, " God bless 
you ! " 



Heroes and Martyrs 59 

He strode away to the left, and the 
Belgian went to the right, as directed, and 
the next moment I perceived that my small 
man with the tuft of grey beard was 
following him. He overtook him before 
they reached the corner, touched him 
diffidently on the arm and raised a forefinger 
to his cap respectfully. 

They spoke together in some compli- 
cated fashion ; I was not near enough to 
hear what was said, but the Belgian laughed, 
a pleased, breezy laugh, and shook his 
head emphatically. But the other was 
obstinate ; he laid a detaining, a pleading 
hand on the soldier's shoulder, and whilst 
I was wondering whether he was thus 
pressingly inviting him to adjourn to the 
tavern that was conveniently adjacent and 
accept refreshments, he glanced round and 
signalled to a taxi which stood by the kerb. 
He called to the driver some instructions 
concerning a hospital at Hampstead, then 
drew the still laughing and protesting 
Belgian forward, resolutely helped him 
into the cab, climbed in after him, and 
slammed the door. 



60 Heroes and Martyrs 

I forgot all about our national character- 
istic as I stood and saw the taxi drive 
away with them. I had a rash, silly 
impulse to take off my hat and shout, and 
though I was too self-conscious to do 
anything of the sort, I did, as a matter 
of truth, take it off in my heart to them 
both. 



CHAPTER IV 

" The Colossal British Calm " 

" The gods love courage armed with confidence." 
Beaumont and Fletcher's Bonduca. 

There is something very boyish, something 
almost childish in the German idea of 
" fright fulness." It harmonises with the 
ferociously upturned moustaches of the 
Kaiser, with the swagger of the ridiculous 
goose-step, with the wearing of impressively 
spiked helmets that look like iron or steel 
but are for the most part papier mache, 
and indicates an attitude of mind that is 
common to boys and undeveloped races 
who seriously fancy they can scare an 
adult opponent with horrible noises, ghastly 
painted faces and other shocking sights. 
There was a time when our ancestors 
decorated themselves with woad, wore grim 
head-dresses and did their best to frighten 
the enemy with shows of terror, but that 

61 



62 The Colossal British Calm 

was long ago. We are now a mature 
people, and it would be strange if this 
sort of thing moved us to anything but 
amusement and contempt. But though 
their efforts in this direction on Belgian 
territory have done no more than frighten 
women and children and inspire Belgian 
manhood with a deep resentment and more 
determined courage, the Germans still 
cling with a pathetic tenacity to a belief 
in these crude methods of boyhood and 
barbarism. They have told us that when 
they land in England they will so devastate 
our country that ruined Belgium shall 
seem a garden by comparison ; they have 
sternly warned us that if our civilians 
dare to take up arms in defence of their 
homes they will slaughter them ruthlessly ; 
they have stated that they intend to strike 
our whole nation with panic by bombarding 
our coast towns and sending enormous fleets 
of Zeppelins over our inland cities tc* 
murder us helpless citizens with bombs — 
even though we are not to be allowed 
to fire on their sacred soldiery. And the 
other day a prominent German official 



The Colossal British Calm 63 

declared that they were just about to begin 
this essay in " fright fulness," and would 
do such things as would shake " that 
colossal calm on which the British so 
pride themselves." 

Nevertheless, I go about at large among 
my fellow countrymen and discover no 
signs of perturbation. Nor did I expect to. 
We may be a more emotional people than 
is generally supposed — I think we are ; but 
fear is not to any extent one of our emo- 
tions. I confess I have been surprised to 
see stolid business men weep over the 
sufferings of the Belgians ; I have seen the 
tears come into their eyes when they heard 
of the heroism of some of our men at the 
front ; but though I have spoken on 
the subject with hundreds of them I have 
never yet found a man or a woman among 
us who has been affected by those German 
menaces to anything but laughter or a quiet 
readiness to abide the event. It is not 
that we consider them incapable of carrying 
out their worst threats, but, as I say, our 
race has left its boyhood behind it, and in 
the main, we face the great issues of life 



64 The Colossal British Calm 

and death with the sanity and philosophy 
that are natural to mature years. It is 
because we have arrived at this stage 
of maturity that we read in their own 
papers with surprise of the implacable, 
limitless rage of hatred that burns in the 
universal heart of Germany against our 
country. We have no such hatred of the 
Germans ; I cannot conceive that we 
are capable of it. We dislike them, no 
doubt, but not beyond the limits of decent 
human feeling. In proof of which I could 
adduce many personal experiences, of 
which the following anecdote is sufficiently 
typical. 

In the first few weeks of the war, certain 
of our newspapers started a rather frenzied 
campaign against German spies in England, 
and especially in London. They conveyed 
a false impression to foreigners that our 
nerves just then were in a quite jumpy 
condition, but the scare went very little 
beyond the columns of those newspapers. 
The man in the street was interested, but 
he did not take the German barber or the 
German waiter too seriously as a dangerous 



The Colossal British Calm 65 

secret agent ; he assumed that the usual 
authorities were probably as well informed 
as any excitable journalist and that if 
the alien enemy in our midst needed looking 
after they would look after him. At that 
period, I went one morning into the shop 
of a City barber whom I occasionally 
patronise. Usually four Germans were at 
work there. That morning there was only 
one assistant, and he was an Englishman. 

" A good job too," he remarked viciously, 
as he lathered me. " Been too many o' 
them Germans over here taking the bread 
out of us Englishmen's mouths. Now some 
of us will get a chance. They're glad now 
to be able to get hold of some of us. But 
we haven't cleared them all out yet — 
not by a jug-full ! I know where plenty 
of them are still at work. Out 'em all, that's 
what I say. I'd like to raise a party of 
our chaps and go round London and root 
out every man jack of 'em. I know where 
to find 'em. Why, there's two still workin' 
just round the corner here. Deceut enough 
fellows in their way — I used to work in 
the same shop with them once — but let 



66 The Colossal British Calm 

'em stick to their own country ; that's 
what I say. We don't want 'em here, 
p'ticularly not now. Clear 'em out — every 
one of 'em." 

" Certainly," I agreed, " if they are spies, 
or even if there is the smallest reason for 
suspecting them. But I don't like being 
too indiscriminate. I met a German yes- 
terday whose business was shut up and 
ruined, and he was in a state of absolute 
despair. He was going back home because 
he had to, but so far as I could judge he was 
much more bitter against his own country 
than against ours. His friends are here, 
and he had grown prosperous here. After 
all — what share did you have in making 
this war ? " 

" Me ? Why, none, of course. How 
could I ? " 

" Neither did I. And it seems possible 
that many of these poor beggars of Germans 
over here had no more to do with making it 
than you or I did." 

" Well," he confessed tolerantly, " that's 
what one of 'em said to me. These two 
round the corner- — I was passing their shop 



The Colossal British Calm 67 

on my way here to-day and one of 'em 
was standing at the door, and spotting me 
he come out fussy-like to shake hands. All 
right in his way, y'know, as I say— we was 
always pretty good friends when I worked 
along of him ; so what could you do ? I 
shook hands, but I says to him, ' Look here, 
what are you doing over here ? Why 
haven't you gone back home ? ' ' Zis is my 
home — here,' says he. ' I'm not going.' 
1 Haven't you had your papers ? Haven't 
they called you back to serve ? ' I arst him. 
' No matter,' he says, ' I'm not going. I 
did not make zis blasted var,' he says — just 
like that, in his broken English, y'know, 
' and vhy should I fight it ? I vill not. 
I have lived here over twenty years ; my 
vife is English, and I haf my children,' he 
says, ' and one of dem is in ze hospital 
and I vill not go.' ' Well, you can thank 
your precious Kaiser for that,' says I ; 
' he's the curse of Europe, that's what he is.' 
' Tank him ! ' he says, stamping his foot 
and all of a tremble. ' Dam der Kaiser, 
dat's vat I say, bringing all zis misery on 
his own people and everybody else — dam 



68 The Colossal British Calm 

der Kaiser ! ' Well, what could yer do ? 
I thought he was going to bust out crying, 
so I just said dam the Kaiser too, and shook 
hands with him again and left it — and there 
you are. What could yer do ? " 

So far as my experience has gone, our 
average man's hatred of the German seldom 
goes much deeper than that. He reserves 
his hatred for the autocratic German govern- 
ment and the barbarous German system 
that drives its people in such subjection 
as a self-governing nation would never 
submit to. 

In the bulk we are not a fussy race ; we 
have no marked inclination for pushing 
around to tell everybody else how his work 
ought to be done. It was impossible for 
those newspapers to make our flesh creep 
with sensational tales of the German spies 
who were swarming up and down the 
country betraying us with impunity, simply 
because we were satisfied that our elected 
governors were as anxious and as competent 
as ourselves to deal with that question ; 
and it is as impossible for the Kaiser to 
alarm us with his timid coast bombard- 



The Colossal British Calm 69 

merits and his flamboyant threats of Zep- 
pelin raids, simply because we are confident 
in the capacity and proved courage of our 
army and navy to give us all the protection 
that is humanly practicable. This night, 
as I am writing these lines, messengers have 
been sent through the little town where I 
live, near the mouth of the Thames, to 
warn us that the streets will remain un- 
lighted to-night and that our windows must 
be completely darkened as a wireless warn- 
ing has come that a fleet of Zeppelins and 
aeroplanes left Germany this evening for 
a raid on England. Well, we have duly 
screened our windows and are contentedly 
minding our business as usual, taking it for 
granted that the local authorities are mind- 
ing theirs and are in need of neither our 
advice nor assistance. Which does not 
indicate any slackness or indifference in us, 
as I have shown and shall show further, 
but that our native common-sense stands 
us in good stead even under the shadow 
of danger. 

The only effect of the wanton bombard- 
ment of unprotected Scarborough, apart 



70 The Colossal British Calm 

from the brutal murder of women and 
children and unarmed men, was to stiffen 
the backs of some who had been hesitating 
and quicken our recruiting movement. The 
more recent and equally barbarous air- 
raid on Yarmouth had the same healthful 
effect. No sooner had the enemy air- 
craft finished scattering death and destruc- 
tion at random and run away, than the 
men of the town marched in a great pro- 
cession through the streets shouting the 
war-cry of our troops at the front, " Are 
we downhearted ? " and answering it with 
a thunderous " No ! " So far from being 
terror-stricken you will find, if you go among 
them, that the folk of Scarborough and of 
Yarmouth take a sort of perverse pride and 
satisfaction in what has happened to them, 
for the fact that they too are sharing in the 
perils and horrors of the war seems in some 
strange, fine way to draw them into closer 
sympathy and fellowship with their lads 
who are out in the firing line and make them 
brothers in arms with them. 

I understand the feeling, and in a lesser 
degree have been warmed by it myself. 



The Colossal British Calm 71 

For on Christmas Day a German aeroplane 
flew over my own little town and flung down 
bombs at a venture that fell harmlessly 
on the outskirts of a small village farther up 
the river. The loud buzzing of the machine 
overhead and a sound of occasional shots 
brought a good many people out into the 
streets : they stood in groups here and 
there to watch the enemy machine flying 
rapidly seawards hotly pursued by two 
British airmen and, as soon as they were 
beyond sight, broke up, laughing and 
chattering, and returned to their Christmas 
dinners. It was an inevitable accompani- 
ment of the war ; the sort of thing we had 
all been expecting since the Yarmouth 
affair. It aroused a keen interest in the 
neighbourhood ; there was a little natural 
excitement, the pleasant thrill of satis- 
faction that we, like our fellows in France, 
were in the danger zone, but never a thought 
of fear in any man, woman or child of us 
all. 

" They're bound to come over and have 
a try," was the general comment, " and 
if they didn't get a little bit of useless 



72 The Colossal British Calm 

success now and then, as they did at Scar- 
borough, it would be a miracle, and we 
never expected miracles." 

Two days ago (on Sunday, January 24th) 
we heard the boom of heavy gun-firing in 
the distance. It was faint, far-away, and 
we guessed that something was happen- 
ing off the coast ; that perhaps the fort 
at Shoeburyness was engaged, some five 
or six miles beyond us at the mouth of the 
Thames, or the fort at Sheerness on the 
other side of the river. The firing was 
continuous until nearly one o'clock, and 
when we saw yesterday's papers we con- 
cluded that it must have been the sound of 
the fight in the North Sea that was raging 
on Sunday morning and ended in disaster 
and defeat for the marauding Germans, 
who had sallied forth to attempt another 
coast bombardment. But at the time 
we could only guess at the meaning of the 
sounds and wait for enlightenment. 

About noon I went out for half an hour's 
walk, and the streets were fairly alive with 
the usual streams of worshippers going 
home from church. They were gossiping 



The Colossal British Calm 73 

as unconcernedly as on any ordinary Sun- 
day, though the intermittent throb and 
rumble in the air mingled rather ominously 
with their cheerful talk. I caught enough 
of their conversation in passing to know 
that the war was rarely the subject of it, 
and the only sign they gave that they were 
aware of the distant thunder of battle was 
that now and then somebody would turn 
towards the sound and throw a casual glance 
skyward, as if wondering whether there 
were any hostile airships in the vicinity. 

In a sedate byway I overtook two com- 
fortable-looking, tall-hatted, middle-aged 
men walking in the road, whilst their two 
comfortable, middle-aged wives walked in 
line with them on the pavement. 

" It has been going on for a long time 
now," one of the ladies remarked as I went 
by. " I expect it's the Germans again. 
Another air-raid, perhaps." 

" Maybe," said one of the men ; with a 
placid suggestion in his tone that it was 
somebody else's business and was no doubt 
being attended to. "I shouldn't be sur- 
prised." 



74 The Colossal British Calm 

" Either that/' added the other, as 
blandly, "or a submarine attack down by 
Shoebury — something of that sort." 

" I took his word for it," said the first 
man, evidently resuming an interrupted 
narrative. " I never care about buying 
second-hand things as a rule, but he being 
a friend and anxious to sell it, and as he 
assured me it was as good as new — and 
then the very first time we used it . . ." 

And the guns went on booming. 



CHAPTER V 

The Soul of the Nation 

' ' Count how many they stand, 
All of them sons of the land." 

E. B. Browning. 

" Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark ; 
What then ? 'Tis day ! 
We sleep no more ; the cock crows — hark ! 
To arms ! Away ! " 

Ebenezer Elliot. 

Even in those early days when men were 
flocking to the recruiting stations in such 
vast numbers that the wonderful emergency 
organisation of the War Department was 
inadequate to cope with them, a few 
of our public men and a few of our news- 
papers began to cry out that the manhood 
of the nation was not doing its duty and 
that a measure of conscription should at 
once be brought into operation. We, who 
know our public men and our newspapers, 

75 



76 The Soul of the Nation 

listened to or read this too self-opinion- 
ated minority, and did not worry. Lord 
Kitchener had the best means of knowing 
the truth, and he told us that he was fully 
satisfied with the recruiting — it was going 
on so rapidly that the army clothiers and 
the armament factories could not keep 
pace with it. Moreover, those of us who 
took the trouble to go about with our 
eyes open saw for ourselves, and were 
profoundly moved to see, how eagerly and 
in what a spirit of gallant self-sacrifice our 
fellows from every walk of life, rich and 
poor, gentle and simple, were giving them- 
selves by thousands in answer to our 
country's call. An infinitely finer, more 
inspiring and more effective spectacle than 
if we had been needlessly dragooning 
willing men and unwilling, natural fighters 
and natural non-fighters into a possibly 
even larger, but certainly less potent army. 
Nevertheless, our mechanical, stay-at-home 
Jeremiahs, who will never admit that they 
are mistaken, have continued at intervals 
to repeat their lamentable and needless 
appeal for conscription. It is of no con- 



The Soul of the Nation 77 

sequence here, where we understand what 
it means, but to speak plainly it is a false 
and unpatriotic cry, and one that has 
done us no little harm in neutral countries 
that have naturally been misled by it. 

In these latter weeks I have had a good 
many letters from Americans ; some of 
them men who play a prominent part in 
American public life ; and replying to one 
who was especially troubled on this point, 
I gave him a number of significant facts 
that are within my own knowledge, and 
begged him not to believe a word he might 
read in one or two of our papers that 
reflected on the spirit in which our men 
were meeting this great crisis. When he 
answered me, he said he had been over- 
persuaded by an American editor who 
had wanted to publish that letter of mine. 
*' I hope I have not broken the laws of 
courtesy," he went on ; for, of course, 
I had written to him privately (though I 
willingly absolve him for what he has done) . 
" If I have, you must lay it to the strong, 
universal desire on the part of Americans 
to learn as well as possible the fighting 



78 The Soul of the Nation 

spirit of England, to which your letter 
bears ample testimony. You must not 
blame us if we have been suspicious that 
Englishmen were not responding as they 
should. We did not want to believe it. 
We wanted to think of them rising as in the 
days of old with a powerful and united 
front against the enemy. But your own 
papers have been the cause of our suspicions, 
if we have had any, as the enclosed clipping 
bears out. . . . How I wish I were in 
England ! I made a visit there in August, 
1913, and took a trip almost encircling the 
island. But I should like to be with you 
to do some form of service for the fighters 
or the workers. We all recognise that you 
are fighting our battle, for if Germany 
should win it would mean war with her for 
us within ten years. You have our sym- 
pathy because we are of the same racial 
stock, because you are fighting for our 
ideal, and because that ideal must be 
absolutely valid. There is considerable 
interest in doing what little we can for you 
over here. Wherever you go you see 
ladies knitting. They take their work 



The Soul of the Nation 79 

with them to concerts, even to church in 
some cases. But stricken Belgium gets 
the most sympathy. I am to assist as 
chairman of the committee in holding a 
mass meeting in the interests of the Bel- 
gians. Madame Vandervelde, the wife of 
the Belgian Minister of State, will make 
the appeal. We hope our city will respond 
generously. ... Be assured that you have 
American sympathy in this terrible crisis, 
and we read with pride anything that tells 
of the courage and daring deeds of the 
British soldiers and sailors." 

This represents very fairly the general 
tone and attitude of those other letters I 
have referred to. And as one of the un- 
fortunates who are not qualified for service 
in the first line, I can only say that I resent 
angrily, and with all my heart, the way 
in which the boundless enthusiasm and 
courageous spirit of the men around me 
have been misrepresented by even a few 
of our own people. 

Of course, there are slackers and possibly 
cowards among us ; no nation on earth is 
composed exclusively of saints or of heroes ; 



80 The Soul of the Nation 

but it is already a commonplace that no 
nation in the history of the world, without 
being invaded and so forced to fight for 
mere life, has ever risen as ours has risen, 
so spontaneously and in millions, to this 
high occasion. The slackers and cowards 
are inevitable, but a minority. There are 
numbers, fit and of the right age, who are 
held back from enlistment by chafing cir- 
cumstances which nothing short of an actual 
emergency would justify them in ignoring ; 
but most of these are serving in some home 
defence force. There are some — too many 
— who have been discouraged and held back 
by the stupidities and blunderings of the 
War Department, which uses too much red- 
tape and too little practical business human- 
ity in carrying out its obligations to the 
men who are fighting for us ; and if I touch 
first on this aspect of affairs it is because it 
is good that we should know under what 
disadvantages and in face of what dis- 
couragements thousands of our comrades 
have gone away to do their share of the 
duty that is upon us all. 

Only the unwise, and such as have not 



The Soul of the Nation 81 

made themselves acquainted with the mot- 
ley life that lies outside their own social 
circle, will indiscriminately denounce all 
the able-bodied young single men who 
have not promptly joined the colours. If 
they are young men of means, or poor men 
with no dependents, then there is no excuse 
for them, unless it be that they are naturally 
effeminate and chicken-hearted, and so 
even if they were impressed would form 
elements of weakness in any regiment that 
was unlucky enough to contain them. 
Which is one of the reasons why I have not 
the smallest faith in compulsory service. 
The right enthusiastic and fearless spirit is 
burning from end to end of the kingdom ; 
we are already getting all the men we 
want and more than we are prepared to 
handle, and long ago we should have had 
even more if we had conducted our re- 
cruiting arrangements with a more business- 
like efficiency. 

Consider some of those difficulties and 
discouragements in spite of which our new 
armies have grown to upwards of two 
million strong in half a year. 



82 The Soul of the Nation 

" I wish to heaven I could go ! " said one 
young fellow to me last August ; he is a 
clerk in a city office. " I hate to be sitting 
here adding up figures and keeping accounts 
— it seems all so footling and useless at a 
time like this. But what can I do ? You 
know how I'm fixed. It isn't as if my dad 
were still alive. There's my mother and 
my young sister to think of. We have 
never had enough income to be able to save 
anything, and if I went how on earth could 
they manage on my bob a day and the small 
allowance I could get from the Government 
for them ? We live cheaply enough, but 
it would barely pay the rent and taxes of 
our little bit of a house. My only way 
would be to sell up the home and put them 
in one room somewhere. That's what ties 
me by the leg. If only some patriotic 
millionaire johnny would allow them thirty 
shillings a week while I'm away I'd be off 
to-morrow — I can't tell you how I want to 
go ! But as it is — what would you do if 
you were me?" 

That question has been put to me by at 
least a dozen of such men, and I confess 



The Soul of the Nation 83 

I have not dared to advise them that they 
should brush those considerations aside 
and unhesitatingly sacrifice their dependents 
as well as themselves, until the nation's 
need of them is greater than it is. Yet I 
know of plenty who have made that sac- 
rifice, and have in some cases been urged 
to it by those they had to abandon. 

On the outskirts of London, before the 
days of the war, lived a certain family in 
a very small house in one of the most unpre- 
tentious of streets. The man of the house, 
a sober, steady fellow, was a reservist. 
His wife, two sons of nineteen and twenty- 
one, and a male cousin who lodged with 
them made up his establishment. On the 
outbreak of war the husband rejoined his 
regiment . As soon as Kitchener asked for re- 
cruits, the cousin and the elder son enlisted, 
and, said that soldier's wife bravely and 
as if it were a matter of course, " it was 
quite right that they should." A few 
weeks later the younger son came home 
from work one evening and said, " Look 
here, mother, I'm afraid I shall have to go. 
The others have all gone and I can't stay 



84 The Soul of the Nation 

here behind. I can't do it — it makes me 
miserable — I feel I must go." 

" Well," she says, in telling you of it, 
" I felt it would be a bit of a job to manage 
all alone, but it seemed right, you know, 
and I couldn't say anything to stop him." 

So he too went. 

When her four men were at home they 
paid her between them an average of fifty- 
six shillings a week. Now — her husband 
allotted part of his pay to her, and the 
authorities made it up to the usual allow- 
ance of twelve shillings and sixpence a week 
for herself and half-a-crown for her six-year- 
old child. But this fifteen shillings was not 
paid promptly ; it was some weeks before 
it began to be paid at all, and how she 
contrived to live in the interval I do not 
know — I imagine her neighbours helped her, 
as such poor neighbours always will, and 
that the local tradesmen allowed her a 
little credit. 

In her district, as in every district all 
over the country, committees, largely of 
women, have been formed to find out and 
visit the wives and mothers of soldiers and 



The Soul of the Nation 85 

give them help if they need it, drawing on 
the Prince of Wales's Fund for the purpose. 
They are doing a useful and necessary 
work, and on the whole doing it admirably. 
Most of these women visitors are sensible, 
kindly, sympathetic souls who, when it is 
wise to strain a point in any direction, 
strain it towards the home-folk of our 
righting men ; but now and then, here and 
there, a woman of the wrong sort happens 
to have joined these committees, and I 
would urge them to weed her out of her 
place with as little delay as possible, for 
apart from the pain she causes, she is doing 
incalculable harm. A visitor of this wrong 
sort happened to be the one that was chosen 
to look after the welfare of the soldier's 
wife of whom I am speaking. She was a 
lady of considerable means, who never 
having suffered poverty herself, or taken 
much interest in such as did, had no com- 
prehension of the matters she was dealing 
with. She secured a contribution of four- 
and-sixpence a week towards the rent of 
her protege, and there her service, though 
not her visits, ended. Thus we find our 



86 The Soul of the Nation 

soldier's wife receiving a total income of 
nineteen-and-six weekly. Out of this she 
paid every week in rent, eight-and-six ; 
the little daughter being consumptive, she 
had to buy for her, under a doctor's orders, 
special nourishment of eggs and milk, and 
divers medicines, including Parrish's Food 
and Scott's Emulsion, which took another 
six-and-fivepence ; leaving her with four- 
and-six a week for fire and light and her 
own food. Later her position was im- 
proved when by outside intervention the 
committee was moved to grant her medical 
relief, and she was able to procure the child's 
medicines gratis. 

This was a detail her visitor would have 
put right more promptly had she realised 
her duties. But she was so far from 
doing this that during one of her visits, 
having pestered and hurt her subject 
with a too-inquisitorial catechism, she 
said : 

"I'm not surprised that you have not 
let your rooms — you cannot expect to in 
these times. You ought to sell some of 
your furniture, then you and your child 



The Soul of the Nation 8 ? 

could live very comfortably in one room 
somewhere." 

" No, ma'am, I can't do that," said the 
soldier's wife resolutely. " I shall keep 
things together if I can — I daresay I can 
get some work to do — I must have a home 
here for my man and the boys when they 
come back." 

In September she had heard from her 
younger son that he had asked the War 
Department to pay her from October ist 
last three-and-sixpence a week, which was 
half of his pay. But the money did not 
arrive. Writing after a week or two she 
mentioned this to the boy, and he replied 
that he had made the arrangement and the 
amount had been deducted each week 
from his wage. She waited patiently, as- 
suming that it would come in due course. 
Then, on the advice of a friend, she wrote 
to the authorities about it. Down to the 
beginning of January not a penny of this 
money, that had all along been scrupulously 
deducted from her son's pay, had been 
forwarded to her. It was only when a 
troublesome outsider wrote indignantly to 



88 The Soul of the Nation 

the defaulting War Department and threat- 
ened that if it were not disgorged a full 
statement of the facts should be sent 
round to the press that all the arrears were 
promptly sent on and the payment began 
to be made regularly. Even now — and 
this is the experience of many soldiers' 
wives — the allowance on account of her 
husband is occasionally allowed to fall 
a week and two weeks in arrear, which is 
a real and a great hardship, when you 
remember how she is dependent on it. 

But you are not to think that she com- 
plains of all this. She never mentions it, 
except by way of asking counsel of her in- 
timates ; and if she ventures, being sorely 
pressed, to send a note of reminder to the 
authorities, she does it in fear and trembling, 
lest she should get her husband or her sons 
into trouble. But naturally her friends 
talk of it, and such talk does not encourage 
other men similarly placed to throw up 
their situations and enlist, leaving their 
wives subject to such privations. You or I 
might blame the clerks of the War Depart- 
ment and protest that any private firm 



The Soul of the Nation 89 

would have a short way of dealing with such 
muddlers ; but she is more tolerant and 
makes excuses for them. They must have 
a terrible lot to do, she thinks, and things 
are bound to go wrong now and then, so 
she says nothing and patiently makes the 
best of it. 

I like to remember a pleasant old lady 
who is living alone in one of our sleepy 
English villages. Her only son is away 
in the firing line. She has a portrait of 
him, taken in his khaki, standing on her 
mantelpiece, and if you take notice of it 
when you call at her cottage it does you 
good to see and hear the quiet pride she 
takes in him. 

" He was in good work at the farm here, 
but he was one of the first to go from these 
parts," she says. " He came home and 
said, ' Mother,' he says, ' Lord Kitchener 
says he must have more men and it's up 
to me to do my bit. I can't stick here 
while other chaps go and fight for me, can 
I ? I'll have to go. I must have a smack 
at them Germans. I'll arrange about you,' 
he said ; ' you'll be all right, but I feel I 



90 The Soul of the Nation 

must go.' I didn't like him going, but 
somebody had to go," she says, straightening 
her back and glancing again at the portrait, 
" and somehow I shouldn't have liked him 
not to go, either. He's such a good boy, 
too. There isn't a better lad in the 
world." Wonderful how many of these 
mothers use just the same words when they 
are speaking of their sons. " He was 
always fond of his mother. He writes to 
me regular, and he keeps saying : ' Don't 
you bother over me. I'm well and hearty. 
Take care of yourself and write and tell 
me how you are, and don't worry.' They 
send me part of his money and an allow- 
ance, and I'm glad because if I couldn't 
write and say I was quite comfortable he'd 
be anxious about me. But I can't help 
worrying a little this bitter cold weather 
for wondering whether he's got warm 
things on in those dreadful trenches, and 
sometimes I lie awake in bed for fear he 
might be wounded and lying out there 
on the ground with nobody to take care of 
him, and I can't sleep for thinking of 
it." 



The Soul of the Nation 91 

She says it simply and almost without a 
touch of emotion, and perhaps you have 
a passing vision of how in every town and 
village of the country, nowadays, some of 
these mothers and wives lie awake at night 
thinking like that. And this not only in 
such homes where they are living as under 
siege, keeping the wolves from the door, 
but in countless homes where petty financial 
cares are not added to the great anxiety. 

These financial obstacles to recruiting 
could be largely mitigated ; the nation 
is rich enough to make adequate provision 
for the responsibilities of its soldiers, and, 
Which is even more important, is competent 
to see to it that whatever provision be 
granted is promptly and punctually paid. 
There have been other serious obstacles — 
there were bound to be, since we were taken 
unprepared, and our recruiting arrange- 
ments are only now sufficiently enlarged 
and perfected — but their deterrent effect 
has to be taken into account. There was 
a period, indeed, when the authorities 
deliberately damped down the enthusiasm 
of recruits because they were coming 



92 The Soul of the Nation 

forward in such unmanageable crowds; 
and it is not easy to rekindle a gener- 
ous enthusiasm that has been systema- 
tically half-smothered. Before we say a 
word about "slackers," real or imaginary, 
it is chastening to recall these things. The 
one other grave obstacle to recruiting that 
still remains is the Official Press Bureau's 
insistence on starving us of news as to 
what is happening. We do not ask to be 
told anything that should be kept from the 
enemy. We can understand the need for 
keeping us mystified as to when and where 
our troops embark and where they are to 
be stationed in the long line of battle ; 
but we cannot understand why we are to be 
told next to no details of any action that is 
fought, even after the action is over. It is 
very well to tell us that more men are 
needed, but we want to see the need for 
ourselves. You have to recollect that 
thousands of men who hear and feel the call 
to serve cannot answer it without making 
great sacrifices — without flinging away a 
career and prospects which, if they come 
back, they may have no chance to resume. 



The Soul of the Nation 93 

This is not a thing for practical men to do 
lightly and with their eyes shut, and the 
marvel is in the circumstances, not that 
some have hesitated to do it, but that such 
multitudes have done it without any hesita- 
tion at all. The heart of the nation is 
sound and fearless and willing. Show them 
the truth ; let them see with their own 
eyes what is happening ; and I will answer 
for it that once the necessity is apparent 
there is scarcely a two-legged man in the 
country who will not make haste to offer 
his services. Our people are no longer 
an ignorant mob ; they can read, and think, 
and judge for themselves, and they prefer 
to do so. You cannot have been abroad 
amongst them and learned to know them 
without knowing they are not afraid of the 
dark, but they are keen to go into it as free 
men should — with their eyes open. 

Howbeit, in defiance of all these and of 
other obstacles, when we called for men 
they came, as Lord Kitchener testifies, and 
they are still coming. Down to July last 
it was a rare thing for us to meet a soldier 
or two about any but our garrison towns. 



94 The Soul of the Nation 

Now they are a familiar sight everywhere. 
Almost every week takes a new draft of 
them away to the front ; you see trains 
crammed with them and piled high with 
their baggage ; you know they are gone, 
and yet there is no appreciable difference 
in the vast numbers that are still getting 
ready to go. Walk up the main thorough- 
fares of London at any hour of the day, and 
every third or fourth man you meet is in 
khaki. Go out into the suburbs ; travel 
through country towns and villages and 
they are there too in plenty. Heath and 
moor and common have been turned into 
training grounds ; and everywhere you 
find the men keen to learn their new business, 
drilling and shooting and digging trenches 
with all their hearts and minds, living in 
towns of brand new huts, or billeted in the 
older, more permanent thorpes and towns 
that are nearest to them. 

If any man doubts or is foolishly pessi- 
mistic about the patriotism or the fighting 
spirit of the nation, let him cure himself 
in a day by taking a motor-drive round 
London and across it, and reflect that what 



The Soul of the Nation 95 

is going on there is going on in and around 
Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birming- 
ham, Liverpool, and all our other cities. 
From Clapham and Wimbledon Common 
down south, round by the open spaces east 
or west, and out to Hampstead Heath 
and Stanmore Heath farther north — all 
London is ringed with marching and drilling 
regiments, in more or less advanced stages of 
preparation. Drive across the town, and in 
one street you overtake a company of 
mounted troops, and a little farther on, 
and a little farther on again, you meet a 
battalion of khakied men out on a route 
march — marching without any band, but 
smart, alert, cheerful, whether they sing 
or whistle a tune to keep step to or go by 
in silence ; spick and span if they have 
just started out, or dusty or splashed with 
mud from a long journey. Mr. Will Irwin, 
the American novelist, has seen these gallant 
fellows footing it through London, and 
though he has probably looked on them 
with more impartial eyes than mine, he 
says in a recent article in the Daily Mail, 
" they marched with their heads thrown 



96 The Soul of the Nation 

back ; for all their English calm, there was 
a light of exaltation in their eyes. They 
looked like people going to take a sacra- 
ment. A far, far nobler thing than any 
conscript has ever done " — because each 
of these men has accepted his duty volun- 
tarily. " He goes not for romance — there 
is no romance in the madness of Europe — 
nor yet for any religion of valour. He goes 
for that noblest motive in war, pure 
patriotism." 

Still a little farther on, and you notice 
some half a dozen companies of energetic 
young civilians at company drill, or prac- 
tising the charge, or the advance in open 
order under the wintry trees of Temple 
Gardens. And presently, as you pass the 
Foundling Hospital, the crisp cry of the 
drill instructor rings in the air, and there 
are two large bodies of ununiformed troops 
going through military evolutions in the 
Hospital grounds. Round the corner, and 
here are more of them, in their shirt-sleeves 
despite the frost on the ground, lustily 
practising Swedish drill in the private 
centre-garden of a Bloomsbury square — 



The Soul of the Nation 97 

four long lines of them, two at each end 
of the garden. It is the same throughout 
your ride — in Hyde Park, in Regent's Park, 
wherever there is a large or small available 
plot of ground, there are men, uniformed 
or ununiformed, at drill on it. 

There are other preparations going on 
less publicly. I called at a city office one 
evening to see a friend, but was told he had 
gone for the day. 

" He has gone early," I remarked. 

" No," said the clerk, casually. " He 
goes at five every Monday, Wednesday 
and Friday — to drill, you know." 

I did not know, for he had not mentioned 
it. He is well past the military age, but it 
seems he had joined one of the numerous 
home defence forces, and three evenings a 
week he devotes two hours to fitting himself 
for active service . Thousands of the middle- 
aged or elderly clerks, or dignified perhaps 
rather pompous employers, that you see 
busy in their shops and offices all day, are 
doing likewise. One such employer told 
me that thirty men had gone from his 
works to the front (as many as six hundred 



98 The Soul of the Nation 

have gone from another and much larger 
establishment) ; he told me too, though not 
till I asked him, that both his sons had 
gone ; but he left me to find out for myself 
that he was enrolled in the Citizen Army 
that has been formed in his own neighbour- 
hood, thirty miles out of London. All day 
he issues orders to his manager, his staff 
of clerks and boys ; but on three evenings 
of every week he submits himself willingly 
to the orders of a drill-sergeant in the 
electric-lighted school-room of his parish. 
These eyes have seen him standing stiffly 
in a line of fifty others, local tradesmen and 
shop-assistants, and have seen him turn 
at the word of command and march, or 
form fours, and go through the rest of his 
exercise as submissively and as promptly 
as any Tommy in the ranks. That sort 
of thing is in progress in drill halls and 
school-rooms in hundreds of towns. Every 
now and then I keep coming across these 
men — steady, unromantic business men, well 
up in years, whom I had never suspected 
of harbouring so fine a spirit. They will 
do a hard day's work in the city, make a 



The Soul of the Nation 99 

railway journey of anything up to forty 
miles home, have an early dinner and then 
turn out again, not merely uncomplaining, 
but as keenly as they went to cricket or 
football when they were boys, and for two 
strenuous hours surrender themselves to the 
drill-instructor to learn how to fight at 
home for their country, if the occasion 
comes, as their sons and nephews and 
friends are fighting abroad. 

And here you are not at the end of it, 
for there are others of them in plenty who, 
having finished a usual day in the office 
or the shop, are parading the frosty streets 
by night as special constables ; and still 
you are not at the end of it when that has 
been said. In my own district, as in far 
more than I am aware of, rifle clubs have 
been started, and to these go men who are 
so circumstanced that they cannot contrive 
to devote three evenings a week to the 
work of one of the citizen armies. Go into 
any one of such clubs between seven and 
ten at night, and you shall see four or six 
civilians shooting, with careful aim, at the 
small targets, and a group of a dozen or so 



100 The Soul of the Nation 

waiting their turns, with fresh arrivals 
dropping in at intervals. 

I once had some talk with a man in a 
rifle range of that sort in one of our East 
Coast towns. He was leaning against the 
wall, holding a gun and waiting till a target 
was free for him — a tall, scraggy, bald 
man, with a mild, serious face and a fringe 
of grey whiskers under his chin. 

"I'm getting on pretty well," he replied 
with a diffident grin. " I never had a 
gun in my hand till a month ago, and I 
made two bulls out of ten shots last time. 
Not so bad ; and, anyhow, no German is so 
small as the target, so I'm all right." 

" Are you joining the Citizen Army ? " 

" Wish I could, but I can't do the three 
evenings a week. My assistant has gone 
to the war, y'see, and I'm making a little 
allowance to his missis till he comes back, 
and rubbing along as best I can on my own, 
and there's nobody to leave with the shop. 
But I come here every early-closing night — 
that's the best I can do, and I wanted to do 
what I could. I've bought my own gun, 
and I know how to use it a bit, so if there's 



The Soul of the Nation 101 

going to be any run-away invasion like they 
talk of, I begin to feel ready for them." 

" You know what happened in Belgium 
when civilians fired on the Germans ? " I 
put in warningly. 

" It would have happened anyhow," he 
said with quiet conviction. " They were 
out to murder and pillage, and they did 
that first and then found an excuse after. 
And it would be the same \i ever they 
landed here. Besides, what's the use of 
talking about laws of war? If civilians 
mustn't shoot them, then their soldiers 
mustn't come here in their aeroplanes and 
throw bombs down on civilians. We can't 
reach 'em in the air, but let them come on 
their feet and me and a lot of us here have 
made up our minds that before they start 
the burning and murdering we'll have a 
shot at them, and they'll have to settle us 
first." 

If you had seen the look that came over 
his face and the light that kindled in his 
eyes, as he spoke, you would have been 
sure as I was that he would be as good as 
his word. If ever the Germans do succeed 



102 The Soul of the Nation 

in making a landing thereabouts, you may 
take it that if he and his friends can have 
no place in the recognised military forces, 
they will set up a firing line of their own, 
and render a respectable account of them- 
selves. 

But there is more of the story yet ; it is 
growing and developing every hour. If I 
were attempting the task of telling it in 
full I should have to get in more than a 
passing reference to the doctors, many of 
whom have discarded valuable practices to 
join the Army Medical Corps ; to the women 
from every walk of life who are serving 
on the field under the Red Cross, and nursing 
in military hospitals at home, who are knit- 
ting and sewing garments for the soldiers, or 
working hard on the innumerable com- 
mittees that are concerned for the welfare 
not only of the soldiers' and sailors' families, 
but of civilians who have lost work or been 
reduced to embarrassed circumstances by 
reason of the war. 

All class distinctions and rivalries among 
us seem to have been wiped out ; we are 
stripped of them, and welded into a nation 



The Soul of the Nation 103 

of men in earnest, with one purpose to fulfil, 
a common enemy to grapple with, and no 
thought of resting from our labours till they 
are ended in victory. From the highest to 
the lowest we are at one ; two hundred 
peers are roughing it in our old and new 
armies, and men have gone unforced from 
every factory and workshop to fight beside 
them or under their leadership. The very 
invalids and cripples have found means to 
do their share and, through newspapers or 
otherwise, have got into touch with some 
lonely soldier here and there in the trenches 
who has nobody to write to him, and are 
sending him books and tobacco and keeping 
up a friendly interchange of letters. It is 
not easy, indeed, to discover anyone who 
is not doing something, in however humble 
unobtrusive a fashion, for the great cause. 
Thinking on all these things, and the like 
of them, " methinks I see in my mind," 
as Milton's stately phrase has it, "a noble 
and puissant nation rousing herself, like a 
strong man after sleep, and shaking her 
invincible locks." Everywhere I turn I am 
heartened by the new spirit of fellowship 



104 The Soul of the Nation 

that has drawn us all together and encircles 
us like an impregnable wall, by the sense 
of irresistible courage and determination, 
of mighty effort united to a righteous end, 
that one feels in the very air like the first 
invigorating breath of a new dawn, which 
shall soon be a new day. 



CHAPTER VI 
In the Trenches 

" Thou didst wage 
War not with Frenchmen merely ; — no, 
Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age." 

James Russell Lowell. 

" Who counsels peace, when Vengeance like a flood 
Rolls on, no longer now to be repressed ; 

When innocent blood 
From the four corners of the world cries out 
For justice upon one accursed head ? " 

Southey. 

To understand that calmness and con- 
fidence of our home-folk, the sight of which 
seems to pique the enemy to new and more 
sensational efforts of -' f rightfulness," one 
must know something of what our soldiers 
and sailors are doing in the war zone, and 
the spirit in which they are doing it ; for, 
of course, our confidence is not nearly so 
much in ourselves as in them. It was too 
deeply rooted in them to be shaken in 

105 



106 In the Trenches 

the least at any time ; from the first hour 
of the war we have never doubted or lost 
heart, because they haven't. 

I went about London during the long, 
heroic retreat from Mons, and there was 
no gloom on the faces in the streets in 
those days, no slackening of the air of 
steady determination and confidence in 
the result which still characterises our 
people. We did not understand it, but 
we knew there were men on the spot who 
did, and that was enough for us. In a 
practical, businesslike way we set to work 
to raise new armies ; we put iron netting 
round certain of our public buildings as 
a precaution against air-bombs, and, by 
and by, as a precaution against the same 
menace, we began to keep the streets of 
our cities less than half lighted of nights 
and to give our coast towns over to com- 
plete darkness. But the shadow over them 
was not of fear, or even of anxiety ; it 
might be a little inconvenient, but one 
soon got used to it and forgot its signifi- 
cance. I have groped my way through 
some of those coast towns on nights that 



In the Trenches 107 

were so black that passers-by could see 
no sign of each other ; they walked in- 
visible, and you only knew they were there 
by the sound of footsteps, of voices in 
careless talk, of the sudden laughter of 
two who had come into collision. And our 
cheerfulness in these circumstances, under 
air-raids and coast bombardments and 
blustering threats of more, is nothing but 
a reflection of the cheerfulness of our 
fighting men afloat and ashore. 

When news came at last that the long 
retirement from Mons was ended, that the 
Allies had taken the offensive and the 
Germans were falling back before them, 
there was no particular excitement among 
us ; it was the news we had been expecting, 
sure it would come in good time. But the 
troops themselves had carried out that bril- 
liant movement grudgingly ; they did not 
dream it was anything but a strategic move, 
but if you talk to any man who shared in it 
he will tell you how the men " groused " at 
having to keep on going back, and fumed 
and raged against it, asking when they 
were to be allowed to hold their ground 



108 In the Trenches 

and " stick it out." They entrenched, 
and fought, and retreated ; entrenched 
and fought and retreated, again and again, 
day and night without rest, till they were 
so wearied that some of them slept as they 
marched, and some of their officers went 
afoot because they could not keep awake 
on their horses and fell off. Dirty, ragged, 
worn, they were always ready to entrench 
again and make another stand ; always un- 
defeated, unbroken, facing the greatest odds 
and the worst hardships light-heartedly, 
with invincible courage, and only grumb- 
ling when the command came to continue 
the retirement. And when the retreat 
ended and it was time to turn, " you couldn't 
believe the change in everyone," says a 
lieutenant in the R.F.A. "We hadn't 
a minute's rest, any more than when we 
were retiring, but now it was northwards, 
driving the Germans before us, and every 
one was whistling and singing." " The 
long retreat had depressed no one," writes 
Lieutenant-Colonel Lowther, of the Scots 
Guards, " and we turned north with much 
zest. ... All the time the men were very 



In the Trenches 109 

cheerful, though dog-tired." Once, he says, 
when it was raining all night and impossible 
to get billets for three companies, the men 
stood up all night round their camp-fires 
" trying to keep dry ; but the rain did not 
damp their spirits in the least." One of 
the men finishes a description of the hard- 
ships of the retreat by saying, " still, I 
would not have missed it for a great deal " ; 
and " we had a very warm time," remarks 
another, " but now we are getting our own 
back." But you get the spirit of them all 
epitomised in two lines of a letter from 
Corporal Cunningham, of the Irish Guards : 
" A lot of us got knocked out," says he, 
" but no one of the name of Cunningham 
is properly knocked out until dead." And 
you have it again in Sergeant M. H. 
Crockett's phrase — after telling how all his 
men were " altered " by the end of the 
retirement and had " long beards and 
haggard, worn faces," he adds " but we 
still stick at it through thick and thin until 
we are killed or wounded " ; and fre- 
quently after they were wounded, for there 
are many stories such as that Q f the 



110 In the Trenches 

Highland Light Infantry Captain near Le 
Cateau, who was hit in the arm by some 
pieces of shrapnel, and the men near him 
ejaculated, " That's done it," but he 
laughed and said, " Stick to it, boys, I'm 
not going away. It's nothing " ; took his 
field-dressing from his pocket, bandaged 
the arm himself, and held his place. 

One thing that strikes you continually 
in reading these letters from the front is the 
fine sense of comradeship and brotherhood 
that has grown up between officers and 
men. Here are a few out of hundreds 
of similar testimonies chosen at random 
from the letters of private soldiers : "It 
is marvellous, the pluck of our officers ; 
they would face anything, and where they 
go we follow them, and would follow them 
anywhere." " Our officers are very careful 
of our lives, and never bring us into action 
without making a personal reconnaissance 
of the position." " I have been asked what 
I think of our officers. No words of mine 
would ever convey any idea of what they 
are like. They are real trumps. They 
are our leaders, and we look to them to lead, 



In the Trenches HI 

and they do it. No shirking with them." 
" We are all good chums and very happy, 
with very good officers." " Our troop 
officer is great. He can speak the language 
and fears nothing." " We cannot speak 
too highly of our officers. Their bravery 
and coolness is beyond words." " We 
have lost heavily, but are not down- 
hearted, as we know we are winning. You 
have only to look at our officers to know 
that. They are cool as cucumbers and 
crack jokes with the men in a way that would 
make my old Colonel turn in his grave. . . . 
The only complaint against our officers is 
that they will not take cover but expose 
themselves too much." " There are some 
fine men in the British Army. Take the 
officers. They are the bravest of the brave. 
Sometimes I watch them and think to my- 
self there are no officers in the world like 
ours." 

Then for what the officers think of their 
men : " The men are splendid," writes 
one, " and as happy as schoolboys." " The 
British Tommy is wonderful," says another, 
" I do not think he can possibly lose his head 



112 In the Trenches 

unless it is blown off by a Black Maria. 
One of my men had his hat riddled with 
bullets from a machine gun. He turned 
round, picked up his hat, felt inside, pulled 
out a mangled packet of Woodbines, said 
a few well chosen words on the subject of 
German machine guns, replaced his hat, 
and advanced ! " And so you have it from 
other officers : " The men are very good. 
In comfortable billets they grouse like hell ; 
but in a clay trench for forty hours in pour- 
ing rain under heavy fire, no matches, very 
little water or food, they laugh and jibe and 
sleep and never a word of grumbling." 
" From the general behaviour of the men we 
might have been engaged in autumn man- 
oeuvres. The fact that they were out- 
numbered never for a moment affected 
their spirits." " If anybody tells you about 
the decadence of the British soldier, tell 
him to go to blazes. There is not a finer lot 
of fellows anywhere, and the way they 
stand up to the most awful wounds is 
marvellous." " If my friends in North 
Hackney could see me, they certainly 
would not recognise their representative," 



In the Trenches 113 

writes Captain Raymond Green, North 
Hackney's M.P. ; "we get covered with 
mud, our clothes coated with clay, and we 
look rather like a gang of miners who have 
been working all day at digging ore. The 
men really are heroes and stick to it without 
any grumbling." ' What brave men are 
ours," says Lieutenant L. Tasker, of the 
R.A.M.C. " If the people of the United 
Kingdom could see the conditions under 
which our men fight, how they fight, how 
they die, the deeds that are done, lives given 
and wounds received, V.C.'s would be won 
many times a day. You should see how 
the wounded act. They suffer wounds 
without a murmur, get them dressed, 
take chloroform, give consent to having 
limbs, fingers, etc., amputated as though 
they were getting their hair cut. They 
are all gloriously brave." " Only the 
highest praise can be given to the men," 
declares another Lieutenant ; and in a 
letter from Captain L. A. F. Cane, of the 
East Lancashire Regiment, you have a 
casual revelation of how finely the officer 
realises his responsibilities : " Our men are 



114 I n the Trenches 

behaving admirably. . . . They put implicit 
trust in their officers, so we must not let 
them down." Since writing that, Captain 
Cane has died at the head of his men, living 
up to that high ideal. 

Reading such things as these, it is easy 
to believe there is not a word of exaggera- 
tion in the letter General Sir H. Smith- 
Dorrien wrote from the front to the Soldiers' 
and Sailors' Families Association: "Never 
has an army been called on to engage in 
such desperate fighting as is of daily occur- 
rence in the present war, and never have 
any troops behaved so magnificently as 
our soldiers in this war. The stories of 
the battles of Le Mons and Le Cateau 
are only beginning to be known, but at 
them a British force not only held its own 
against a German army four times its 
own size, but it hit the enemy so hard that 
never were they able to do more than follow 
it up. Of course our troops had to fall 
back before them, an operation which 
would demoralise most armies. Not so 
with ours, however ; though they naturally 
did not like retiring for twelve successive 



In the Trenches 115 

days, they merely fell sullenly back, 
striking hard whenever attacked, and the 
moment the order came to go forward 
there were smiling faces everywhere. Then 
followed the battles of the Marne and the 
Aisne. Tell the women that all these 
great battles have, day by day, witnessed 
countless feats of heroism and brave fight- 
ing. Large numbers will be given Victoria 
Crosses and Distinguished Conduct Medals, 
but many more have earned them, for it 
has been impossible to bring every case to 
notice. Tell the women that proud as I 
am to have such soldiers under my com- 
mand, they should be prouder still to be 
near and dear relations to such men." 

Since the great battles of the Marne and 
the Aisne, the months of stubborn fighting in 
trenches, with desperate night attacks, and 
slow advances from time to time, have 
made even sterner calls on the endurance 
and heroism of the men and their officers, 
and you may gather a sufficient idea of how 
they have responded to it from these fifteen 
letters that appeared in the Daily Tele- 
graph ; 



116 In the Trenches 

" The thing that has impressed me most 
here," wrote Lord Castlereagh, on duty 
somewhere in France, " has been the 
aeroplane service — a splendid lot of boys 
who really do not know what fear is " ; 
and further testimony to the daring and 
efficiency of our air-craft men appears in 
the first of the following : 

i. — From Lieutenant Jack Bainbridge, AS. C, 
to Mr. B. G. Stone, of Elkington. 

" Our aeroplanes are doing some wonder- 
ful work. Every day the sky is full of 
them, and in every direction you will see 
little clouds of white smoke coming from 
the shells as they burst above and around 
them. I have counted over fifty shells 
fired at one, but have never seen one hit yet. 
Yesterday two came over and were chasing 
each other ; we could distinctly hear the 
shots as they fired at each other, and on 
they went, still firing, out of sight. The 
trenches are most without head cover, and 
have two feet of water in some places, and 
the poor men are simply wet through and 
covered with mud, but I have never heard 



In the Trenches i17 

a grumble yet, in fact they are always 
cheery. I was up at the trenches last night 
and talked to some of the Hunts men; 
they were mud up to the eyes, but quite 
cheery. It is truly an honour being allowed 
to help such men, and if England only 
knew one tiny bit what is happening out 
here she would be proud of her sons." 

2. — From Corporal E. Clark, ist Lincoln 
Regiment, to Major Haggard, Chairman 
of the Veterans' Club : 

" We found ourselves surrounded in the 
shape of a horseshoe, the enemy firing at 
us from all angles. We just got the order 
to retire when a shell struck the trench 
just in front, a piece catching me on the 
nose and burying me, but I managed to 
crawl out nearly blind, and started to 
retire under a murderous rifle fire. No one 
could realise what it was like unless actually 
there. Men were crawling about like ants 
trying to reach safety, but it was only luck 
for those that did. I managed to get to a 
wood, where I found a number of wounded, 
and waited until the firing cooled down, 



118 In the Trenches 

when we chanced it over the river, getting 
there as best we could, the Germans shelling 
the bridge the whole time, also a railway 
cutting in which we got for shelter. That 
is where I received a shrapnel in the right 
calf. 

" It was impossible to leave there. The 
ambulance could not get near us, so we 
had to make the best of it until eight 
o'clock at night, when the stretcher bearers 
told us we must get to Braisne, about four 
miles, as best we could. By this time I 
could not open my eyes. It was the blind 
leading the blind. How we got out of it 
I do not know, but was not sorry when we 
found ourselves in a farmhouse (a lot we 
had to leave behind in different places, as 
their wounds were too bad), so after a hot 
meal — the first bit to eat for thirty-six 
hours — we anchored for the night. 

" In the morning the ambulance was 
waiting for us. We collected ourselves 
together, and no sooner were we outside 
the door when a shell smashed through the 
house, knocking it to the ground. We 
managed to get in the ambulance, when they 



In the Trenches 119 

sent us another reminder, catching me in 
the left ankle, besides two or three more, 
so I can thank my lucky stars I am still 
alive. 

" A private of the Welsh Regiment stay- 
ing in my tent helped to bury your nephew 
(Captain Mark Haggard). He told me his 
last words were ' Go along, the Welsh,' 
and that he was buried about twelve 
midnight on September 14th in the battle 
of the Marne." 

3. — From an officer in the Duke of Edin- 
burgh's (Wiltshire) Regiment to his 
wife : 

" We are living in fair-sized ' dug-outs,' 
about 5 feet deep and 8 feet wide and 
20 feet long. There are five of these 
' dug-outs ' on the edge of a wood all con- 
nected by deep communication trenches. 
The 'dug-outs' are roofed over with pine 
logs and about 18 inches of earth. We 
have tables and chairs and straw inside, 
so we are fairly comfortable. We cannot 
go outside much, as shrapnel keeps on 
bursting over us and bullets that have gone 



120 In the Trenches 

high over the trenches in front keep on 
hitting the trees all round, which are all 
pitted and cut with bits of shell. 

" Our kitchen is just next door in a deep 
hole, with a trench connecting up. You 
would be very amused to see us all bobbing 
in and out like a lot of rabbits. The firing 
line is about three-quarters of a mile in 
front of us. We have great difficulty in 
getting water, which is scarce, and then 
we have to boil it. However, we manage 
to do ourselves pretty well all the same. 
We get our Government rations every 
day, and supplement them with the things 
you all send out to us. Our menu to-night 
is going to be 

Tinned Ox Tail Soup. 

Fried Fillet of Beef. 

Potatoes and Peas. 

Rice Pudding. 
Whisky and soda. 
" Don't you think I am pretty good at 
raising a dinner. We sleep in one hut, all 
huddled up, as it is very cold, but I use the 
sleeping bag and find it very warm. We 
have not been able to take our clothes off 



In the Trenches 121 

now for four days. Although we are in 
the best of spirits, we are going through a 
pretty critical time, as the fighting has 
been very heavy indeed." 

4. — From a member of the Honourable 
Artillery Company : 

" Have had a very busy week — no time 
to write a line. Up at six, off before dawn, 
digging trenches near the firing line, back 
at dark. Weather horrid — rain, and even 
snow. Am feeling well, but tired. No 
luxuries to eat. Do send me cake and 
' chocs.' Many thanks for mother's letter 
and prayer-book, which I'll keep — though 
no time to read — for her sake. We are 
billeted in a beastly barn, into which rain 
and wind blows, but we manage to keep 
warm and well. It is most interesting 
here. 

" Tommy Atkins is magnificent even in 
these conditions. They are very nice to us, 
and to-day the Scots Fusiliers gave us tea 
and apples while on the march. I have 
had my first experience of fire. Very 
interesting, no casualties ; we acted as 



122 In the Trenches 

reserves. The battery shelled the Germans 
out, the British retiring from first trench. 
Then after hard fire, our first line charged, 
capturing the first two German trenches 
and 160 men. 

" The Germans are thoroughly demor- 
alised, and their fire is nothing to be 
frightened at — even the artillery has not 
the range or accuracy of ours. In fact, 
they have been shelling our trenches for 
weeks without damage until yesterday, 
when, unfortunately, we sustained our first 
loss — one killed and nine wounded in No. 3 
Company ; I don't know them. The ex- 
perience of going under fire is not at all 
alarming." 

5. — From Sapper George Comber, Royal 
Engineers, whose father is a Redhill 
tradesman : 

" Those who condemn football would not 
say a word against the game if they had 
seen and heard what I have in passing to 
and from the trenches and firing-line. 
The grim horror of war is relieved by the 
football instinct of many of our soldiers. 



In the Trenches 123 

When the Royal Highlanders were ordered 
to make a charge in an engagement they 
jumped out of the trenches, and might have 
been kicking off in a cup-tie final. They 
commenced to shout, ' On the ball, High- 
landers,' and ' Mark your men.' They 
continued yelling to one another until they 
had driven the Germans back, ' Mark 
your men,' the officers and non-coms, joining 
in as loud as they could. Who can say, 
' Mark your men ' did not have a stimu- 
lating effect upon the Highlanders ? 

" The French soldiers cannot understand 
the sang-froid of the British troops. One 
day at Bethune the Lincolns had a game of 
football, and the Frenchmen looked on. 
During the game a German aeroplane 
came over and dropped a few bombs, but 
no one was injured. The game was stopped, 
and there was a rush for the rifles. They 
fired, but did not wing the aeroplane, 
and a French machine gun was brought 
into action. It brought her down, and 
the game was continued. The Frenchmen 
cheered the players, and one of them 
said to me, ' You English are very, very 



124 In the Trenches 

misunderstandable. Fancy playing foot- 
ball when German bombs are dropping 
from the skies.' " 

6. — From an officer in the ist Battalion 
Devonshire Regiment to a friend in 
England : 

" On the night of October 22nd, we ad- 
vanced a bit and dug ourselves more or 
less in by dawn, and soon after light we saw 
great masses of German infantry emerge 
from woods and hedges some 1,000 yards 
to our front, and advance to attack us. We 
opened fire on them, and killed dozens. 
This was answered by the Germans with 
a tremendous shell fire from their heavy 
guns. The Devons were perfectly wonder- 
ful ; not a man left his trench. All day 
long the battle raged, and you never saw 
such an inferno. By night the place was 
a mass of fire, smoke, dead, and dying. All 
night they attacked us. Sometimes they 
got right up to our trenches, only to be 
hurled back by the Devons' bayonets. 
Dawn broke on the 24th with the same 
struggle still going on, and it continued all 



In the Trenches 125 

day and night, and all through the 25th. 
We never slept a wink, and by night we were 
absolutely done. No humans could have 
done more. 

"The men were perfectly splendid, and 
repulsed every attack, with great loss to 
the enemy. We were relieved at one a.m. 
on October 26th, and as we marched back 
a mile into billets all the troops cheered 
us frantically. General Smith-Dorrien sent 
a wire congratulating us on our splendid 
fight. We heard officially from Divisional 
Headquarters that there were 1,000 dead 
Germans in front of our trenches. The 
whole place was littered with their dead. 
We lost four officers killed, four wounded, 
and 150 men killed and wounded. One 
shell pitched in my company's trench, 
killing and wounding two officers and 
thirty-five men. 

" On the 27th we were in another fight. 
This time we relieved another regiment, 
some five miles north of our last fight, and 
here we found the Germans entrenched 
forty yards from us. W T e fought here until 
November 1st, night and day again. The 



126 In the Trenches 

Germans made six attacks on our left on 
October 29th, all of which we drove off. We 
killed a lot here. One of the bayonet 
charges accounted for seventy dead Germans 
and fourteen prisoners. The German losses 
here are perfectly gigantic, and we are win- 
ning all along. The splendid behaviour of 
the English troops has won everyone's 
admiration — even the German. After our 
last fight, the Devons again were con- 
gratulated all round. They have made a 
tremendous name here, and everywhere 
one goes all ranks pass the word, ' Good 
old Devons.' " 

7. — From a Lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. : 

" In front of us are the German trenches, 
only 100 yards away. A bobbing head, 
a shaking fist, an occasional spade-wave, 
bespeak the presence of our foe. Yester- 
day, one of our merry men fixed up a 
target. On white paper he drew the bull's- 
eye, with a charred stick, tied it on a card- 
board box, placed it in front of the trench, 
and with flag behind recorded the misses 
of our friend Fritz. I feel sure that if in 



In the Trenches 127 

those trenches we had a more humorous 
foe instead of the phlegmatic Teuton, we 
might pass away many of the weary hours 
of watching in friendly joke. But we are 
up against a wary foe ; there is no leisure, 
for barbed wire, artfully contrived hoops 
and loopholes for ever claim the attention 
of our brave men. 

" There are times, though, when even 
under fire the humour of our soldiers bursts 
forth. On one occasion, after a German 
shell had fired some wood, our men, seeing 
the fire seized the opportunity to cook 
their food. Yesterday I heard an amusing 
story under trying circumstances told con- 
cerning a man in the regiment lying next 
to us. Shrapnel had burst killing two 
men on his left, and badly shattering 
another. He was trying to light a pipe, 
and having some difficulty he said to his 
mate, ' Shure 'tis Belgian tobacco, and 
these French matches will be the death of 
me.' I sometimes help the officers to 
censor the men's letters home. One man 
says, ' We have shells for breakfast — not 
egg-shells. I shall be in Berlin in a fort- 



128 In the Trenches 

night, and I'll send you some sausages.' 
I overheard on the march one Pat say to 
another, ' I never believe anything I hear, 
and only half of what I say.' I might add, 
' nothing that you write,' for on one occa- 
sion I saw the letter of a man sitting in 
perfect safety beginning, ' Midst shot and 
shell I write to thee, dear mother.' But 
honestly, I think our men always try to 
look on the light side of life, and they bear 
their ailments with fortitude. It takes a 
great deal to make them give in." 

8. — From Corporal A. G. Reid, A.S.C., to 

his brother-in-law at Redhill : 

" I saw it stated in a letter that the 
Germans were not brave. Don't you be- 
lieve it. They will not stand up to the 
bayonet unless pushed on to it — I know ; 
but they face rifle fire and shrapnel in a 
manner which you can't help but admire. 
The way they are massed and marched 
against trenches is madness, but they are 
not cowards. I am telling you what I know 
personally and have seen. 

" It was only last week I saw such a sight. 



In the Trenches 129 

I shall never forget it. I was at a place 
just behind our trenches when a whole corps 
of Germans made for us. Mind you, they 
did not come in a mad rush, but they stepped 
out as if out for a long march. They sang 
their national song lustily, and must have 
known, as they were so thickly massed, 
they were marching on to destruction. 
But they came on, and our chaps were 
awaiting them with glee. Not a shot was 
fired until they got so close that it was 
impossible to miss them. 

" Then the order was given, and didn't 
our rifles and maxims speak ! Of course 
they fell in their hundreds, but there was 
no wavering. It was amazing. Hundreds 
stepped into their places and the ranks 
closed again. They still came on, only to 
fall, and this kind of fighting went on for 
some time until they realised that even 
numbers can't take British trenches in this 
fashion. They had to fall back to take 
cover, but were shelled out of all kinds of 
hiding places, only to face shrapnel. The 
ground round the trenches was packed 
with dead bodies, and hundreds were taken 



130 In the Trenches 

prisoners. One of them who could speak 
English well begged me to give him food." 

9. — From an officer in the Camerons to the 
Headmaster of Eton : 

" Two of the Camerons were sitting in 
their trench one day, when one of the 
biggest ' Jack Johnsons ' arrived and blew 
their rifles literally to matchwood, but did 
not touch the men. One of the same sort 
pitched in a farmyard some days before 
we got here, where two horses were tethered 
under a projecting sort of penthouse roof 
of a big barn. It blew a big hole through 
the roof and the largest piece of horse they 
could find afterwards was a hind leg on the 
top of the barn. In the early part of the 
war we had two meals a day and more 
exercise than we could do with ; now we 
eat four meals a day and get no exercise 
at all. I am getting a colossal size, and 
can hardly button my coat. Perhaps it's 
not a bad thing with cold weather and 
possibly long treks in front of us. Anyhow, 
I have made up my arrears of sleep now. 

" We are beginning to be inoculated 



In the Trenches 131 

against enteric, which is a good move ; 
what with living in a pit like this and 
unburied men and horses all over the 
place, it won't be long before something 
breaks out. I believe the Germans have 
already got it. . . . We use our signal 
officer's claymore for a toasting fork, and 
a captured bayonet as a carving knife, and 
a very good one it makes. Someone said 
if you saw that being done in a war play on 
the stage, like ' An Englishman's Home,' 
you would say it was all rot, but somehow 
we found ourselves doing it without think- 
ing about local colour. 

" The nightmare battle is still going on, 
and no man can see the end. When it 
comes to attacking you do want weight 
behind you. The German theory is right 
there, but they apply their weight in the 
wrong place. Personally I have had enough 
of this valley and of this excessively quiet 
and lazy life. I should like to go straight 
forward and have a look at the German 
trenches and their position generally. It's 
a natural curiosity when one has been 
looking at a ridge for about a month, which 



132 In the Trenches 

might as well be in the moon as far as 
getting there goes. 

" One odd feature of this show is the 
universally pessimistic note of all the 
diaries taken off dead and captured Deut- 
schers. I have never been pessimistic or 
optimistic either. I suppose the reason 
is that, in common with every one else, I 
have been confident all along that we are 
bound to win in the end, so have not 
worried. But unless all German soldiers 
are ordered to keep pessimistic diaries, the 
lot in front of us here have got their tails 
down properly. This is in great contrast 
to the French." 

io. — From an officer in the Guards to his 
father : 

" We spent a quiet night in the trenches, 
and on Sunday morning sniped some Ger- 
mans about 500 yards away, bagging an 
officer. At one p.m. the bombardment 
began, and lasted till dark. They had the 
range almost exact, and blew several 
trenches into the air. I suppose 100 shells 
burst within a few yards of me, coming in 



In the Trenches 133 

groups of four as a rule, and shaking the 
whole ground. At 6.30 p.m. we heard 
cheering on our right, and gathered that a 
counter-attack was taking place. Soon 
after a considerable body of men were seen 
approaching, and word was passed to us 
that they were our troops, so we did not 
fire. Three came right on to the traverse 
of my trench, and about three yards from 
me I saw a German helmet. We at once 
opened fire. I shot the first man, the 
second was bayoneted, and the third 
taken prisoner, as he laid flat down until 
the first flurry was over. 

" We drove the whole lot back in about 
fifteen minutes, with the exception of 
about 200, who were captured, having 
got through where the trenches were blown 
in. It was awkward knowing some were 
behind us, as we did not like to shoot for 
fear of hitting our own reinforcements. In 
my trench I and one man looked out behind, 
the remainder watching the front. They 
had a machine gun in front, and one had to 
duck occasionally when one heard it. Our 
gun behind was also sweeping with shrapnel 



134 Irx the Trenches 

and every shell just touched our parapet, 
so I had to watch for the flash and shout 
' Duck ! ' The other companies lost some 
officers and men when rounding up those 
that had got through, which was awkward 
work, seeing that the darkness was only 
relieved by the light of burning houses. 

" From eight to nine a.m. on the 26th 
the German guns wasted some ammunition 
at some unoccupied trenches just in the 
rear of the line ; but they then discovered 
their mistake, and literally blew our 
trenches to pieces. 

" Fresh troops came up, and I believe all 
is well with the situation. We are feeling 
a bit tired, but are quite well, and in a few 
days shall be ready to have another go." 

11. — From Lance-Corporal J. Ryall, of the 
1st King's Royal Rifles, to his mother at 

Cowes : 

" Our lads in the company are sticking 
it well up till now. We all work together 
and do our best. If we only had to fight 
their infantry we would make a bit of a 
name and soon be in Berlin, I think. 



In the Trenches 135 

Smoking gives you a lot of comfort when 
you are in the trenches, with only shots 
and shells flying about. The Germans 
have not moved from here yet, but before 
we finish our tour of France we are either 
going to make sausage-meat of them or 
wait until November 5th, and burn them. 

" Whilst I have been out here I have 
seen the finest and saddest sights of my 
life. You see some amusing incidents as 
well. The Germans were shelling a field 
opposite to us for an unknown reason, for 
there were only a few dead cows there. 
Some of our chaps were getting walnuts, 
and the German shells were knocking 
walnuts down and the men were picking 
them up. During the first day of the 
battle here two of our companies were 
acting as right flank guard to the brigade, 
and we encountered the Kaiser's famous 
Prussian Guards. We were greatly out- 
numbered, and our commanding officer 
told us that we killed five of theirs to one 
of ours. They were finely-built fellows 
and a great height. 

" Our position here puts me in mind 



136 In the Trenches 

of the Wild West pictures. I think if I 
come through safely I must have fourteen 
lives, but I have been very lucky in all 
these big scraps up till now." 

12.; — From an officer of the ist Battalion 
Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment: 

" We had two days' fighting last week, 
and the regiment did splendidly. Our 
casualties were fortunately few, but the loss 
inflicted upon the enemy was enormous. 
The brigade took over 400 German prisoners 
on one day, all of whom seemed only too 
delighted to be behind our firing line instead 
of in front of it. In our advance we were 
pulling them out of the cottages and barns 
and ditches in all directions, and a very 
mixed lot they were. 

" The German shrapnel fire was terrific, 
but fortunately it did not cause us much 
loss. We are all so used to it now that what 
they call its ' moral effect ' is almost nil. 
Their rifle fire is not to be compared with 
that of our men, while our own shrapnel is, 
on a low estimate, four times as deadly as 
theirs, having far greater explosive power. 



In the Trenches 137 

" One of the Queen's said to me the other 
day, ' Why can't we stop the guns for 
twenty-four hours, sir, and let us have a 
good go at them with the bayonet ? ' 
Every one of us feels and knows that he is a 
match for three Germans at least. Our 
only trouble is when we have more in front 
of us than we can shoot in the time. They 
have now taken to attacking at night in 
order to minimise the effect of our rifle fire, 
but even then they do not get any change 
out of us. 

" We are all extraordinarily well fed and 
clothed, and as happy and contented as we 
can be — a regular band of brothers. An 
officer in another battalion who was watch- 
ing the Queen's advance the other day said 
he had never seen anything finer. He 
said, ' Well, this is the real thing ; this is 
war.' The absence of illness is quite extra- 
ordinary. It really seems as if there were 
more invalids in one street at home than 
one ever sees out there. 

" It is men we want. It is only by sheer 
numbers and nothing else that the enemy 
can push on. We all feel if our million 



138 In the Trenches 

men were ready now we would drive the 
Germans back to the Rhine as fast as we 
could march behind them." 

13. — From Trooper A. F inlay, of the Royal 
Horse Guards (Blue) to his aunt at 
Beckenham : 

" The night of all nights and the one I 
shall remember to my dying day was on 
Sunday, the 1st. We were lying in the 
trench, when we were all startled by a 
band in front of us playing the German 
National Anthem. Then on they marched 
and the maxims commenced playing quite 
a different tune. They then halted and 
sang some sort of a hymn. What the idea 
was I cannot quite grasp. Whether it was 
to frighten us or to inspire confidence in 
themselves I do not know. 

" Anyhow, they came on with their 
famous goose-step in six different columns, 
five abreast, rifles at their hips, shouting 
their war cry. But back they went, but 
not all of them, not by a good many. Three 
times they tried and three times they went 
back. The boys were mad by this time. 



In the Trenches 139 

It was as much as the officers could do to 
hold them back. A party of Germans got 
through on our left flank and came up 
behind the regiment, but the ' contemp- 
tible little army ' wiped out the lot. 

" On our right flank was a small town, 
which the enemy tried to get through, but 
the Life Guards charged them with bayonets 
— the first time in the annals of the English 
Army that Life Guards have charged dis- 
mounted with bayonets. And a fine show 
they made. When we got to the trenches 
we could not get in for dead. We could not 
kill them fast enough either with bayonets 
or bullets. The prisoners we took were 
mere spits of boys, 16 to 17 years of age, 
who cried for mercy." 

14. — From the Rev. Owen Watkins, Wesleyan 
Chaplain, serving with the 14th Infantry 
Brigade : 

" Lieutenant Davidson has just been 
sent in wounded in one of the ambulance 
wagons. Early in the day our gunners had 
found it impossible to locate certain German 
guns which were fast rendering our trenches 



140 In the Trenches 

untenable. The country was so flat that 
there was no possible point of vantage from 
which the gunners could observe except 
the steeple of the church in Lourges. But 
the Germans knew that as well as we did, 
so the church was being vigorously shelled, 
and already no less than twelve lyddite 
shells had been pitched into it. 

" It was the duty of Lieutenant Davidson 
to ' observe,' so he calmly went to the 
church, climbed the already tottering tower 
and, seated on the top, proceeded to tele- 
phone his information to the battery. In 
consequence German battery after German 
battery was silenced, the infantry, which 
at one time was in danger of extermination, 
was saved, and the position, in spite of an 
attack in overwhelming force by the enemy, 
was successfully held. The church was 
rendered a scrap-heap, but still Davidson 
sat tight on the remnants of his tower. For 
seven solid hours, expecting death every 
moment, he calmly scanned the country 
and telephoned his reports. 

" At dark his task was done, and he came 
down to rejoin his battery. As he left the 



In the Trenches 141 

ruins a fall of timber in one of the burning 
houses lit up everything with a sudden 
glare, there was the crack of a rifle — the 
German trenches were only a few hundred 
yards away — and a bullet passed through 
the back of his neck and out through his 
mouth. But, without hurrying his pace, he 
walked to his battery, gave them his 
final information, and then said, ' I think 
I'd better go and find the field ambulance, 
for the beggars have drilled a hole in me 
that needs plugging.' And he walked half 
a mile to the nearest ' collecting point.' 

" In the infantry of the 14th Brigade men 
can talk of nobody else but ' Davidson of the 
Gunners.' They themselves face death 
every hour of the day and night, they them- 
selves do unrecorded deeds of heroism 
worthy of the V.C., but with one voice they 
declare, ' Davidson is the real thing. If he 
doesn't get the V.C. — well, nobody deserves 
it.' So I sat and looked at the ruins, and 
wondered what the thoughts and feelings 
of that young man had been as he sat alone 
on the shaky tower seven hours waiting 
for death." 



142 In the Trenches 

15. — From M. Paul Renault, an officer in 
the French Army, to friends at Reigaie: 

" To the British my own fair country 
owes a debt it will never be able to repay. 
To what has military greediness, ambition, 
and jealousy brought us ? I cannot re- 
strain myself when I think for one moment 
of the loss of thousands of innocent lives, 
of the misery and ruin that have been 
brought about by the madness of one man 
and his band of sycophants. 

" Of your officers and men I cannot ex- 
press my admiration of their prowess, their 
steadiness, their humanity, and their fair- 
ness to their enemy. I have been in adjoin- 
ing trenches with them knee-deep in slush, 
while a flood of rain and bullets beat down 
from overhead, but not a word of complaint. 
It was not far from my native village I 
first came in touch with them, and their 
conduct and bravery I freely admit gave 
us courage then and also on many other 
occasions." 



CHAPTER VII 

Keeping the Gates 

' ' Never saw the wild North Sea 
Such a gallant company 
Sail the billows blue ! " 

Longfellow. 

If we have little enough of official news 
about the deeds of our soldiers, of necessity 
we know even less of what the Navy is 
doing. Now and then, when some German 
raiders are hunted down on the high seas, 
or when one of our patrolling fleets catches 
one of theirs sneaking out from behind 
the shelter of Heligoland and shatters 
and drives it home again, the veil lifts 
and vivid but none too detailed reports 
of those actions come to us ; then the 
veil falls again, and day after day passes 
and we see and hear no more. Except 
unofficially, from the letters the sailors 
write to their friends, or perhaps from a 

143 



144 Keeping the Gates 

talk with a chance bluejacket home on a 
day or two's leave. 

But this silence and secrecy is right and 
inevitable. There is nothing, indeed, to 
tell in the interval but a long story of 
patient watching and waiting out on the 
waste of waters in sun and rain and wind 
and snow ; in clear nights when the great 
ships with their flotillas of small attendant 
vessels prowl still and ghostly under the 
moon ; in black nights of fog or mist, when 
they grope their way lampless and invisible, 
peering and feeling after an enemy who may 
possibly be coming upon them unawares 
or trying to dodge past them through the 
impenetrable darkness. All the while, by 
day and night, in calm or storm, there is 
the ever-present danger of touching a 
floating mine and being suddenly whirled 
into roaring destruction and death ; of 
being taken unawares by a lurking sub- 
marine and in a moment torpedoed out of 
existence. This alert, unwearied policing 
of the North Sea keeps our eastern and 
northern coastline immune from invasion 
and the English Channel inviolate, so that 



Keeping the Gates 145 

our troops have crossed by thousands into 
France without the loss of a single trans- 
port. We hear very little about it ; we 
know of it dimly and imperfectly, and not 
till the full story comes to be told in later 
days shall we realise, with wonder and 
admiration and gratitude, all the perils and 
the magnitude of the task that our Navy 
is so masterfully fulfilling. 

Thinking of it now, with such small 
knowledge as we have of the facts, it seems 
impossible that the stress and strain of seven 
months of keeping such constant watch 
and ward amidst hidden dangers, with a 
powerful enemy for ever ready to spring 
and strike in any unguarded hour, should 
not wear down the most iron nerved, and 
play havoc with the confidence and the 
moral of the bravest and most disciplined 
of men. But as a matter of mere truth 
it has had no such effect. Officers and 
men grow impatient and yearn more and 
more to be at grips with the reluctant foe, 
but through it all their cheerfulness and 
their confidence and their courage remain 
unabated. I have never read a complaint 



146 Keeping the Gates 

in any of their letters home, except at the 
timidity of the Germans. Over and over 
again, with trivial variations of phrase, 
you find them sighing, " I wish the German 
fleet would come out." "It is a tiresome 
job," says one, " waiting for the German 
ships to come out. At any moment we 
may be sent to the bottom by their mines, 
but we are very happy, and in good fight- 
ing trim." First-class stoker Lambert Tid- 
man Evans writes to his mother, " We are 
anxious to get a cut at the sausages, you 
bet your boots. We will bust the Germans 
or sink. ... If we meet with bad luck 
you will know all died game, and that 
your son has done his duty to his country, 
pleased with the honour." " The spirit 
of our men is wonderful ! " exclaims Signal- 
man Fred Porch, of H.M.S. Lord Nelson ; 
an officer assures his friends in England 
that " the spirits of the sailorman, like all 
good spirits, improve with keeping, and 
the impatience produced by waiting for his 
turn will send him into any action there 
may be under a high head of steam." 
Marine Colour-Sergeant W. Still, of the 



Keeping the Gates 147 

Vanguard, touching on the same phase of 
the proceedings, thinks " the time of wait- 
ing for the final action is monotonous, but 
if our friend William fancies that he is 
going to wear us down by keeping us 
waiting he never made a bigger mistake in 
his life." They always sleep with one eye 
open, he adds, ready at any moment to 
engage the Germans, day or night, " if 
their ships will only come out." Some- 
times they write rather enviously of the 
men on those ships that are or have been 
in action off the Belgian coast shelling the 
Germans ashore, being shelled in return, 
and smartly dodging the submarines that 
steal on them out of Zeebrugge ; " still," 
they console themselves, " we are all merry 
and bright, and our day will come." " To 
be always on the look out for so long a 
period," Carpenter Joseph Payne, of the 
St. Vincent, writes to his father, " becomes 
monotonous, but our spirits are good. We 
are not depressed, because we live in hope 
that when ' The Day ' comes we shall put 
the German fleet where they are not likely 
to trouble us again " ; and he takes the 



148 Keeping the Gates 

news that " Syd has been wounded " with 
the admirable philosophy that " this being 
the fortune of war we cannot complain." 

Nevertheless, a distinct increase of the 
note of joyousness is apparent in the letters 
that are written just after an action has, 
at last, been fought. " On the whole, it 
was an enjoyable day," comments a wire- 
less operator on the Fearless, in describing 
the first big battle off Heligoland. " It 
was great," writes another bluejacket on 
the same occasion. " I hope they will 
come out again, and oh, may it be soon ! " 
But I particularly like the epistle from the 
middy who, in view of his experiences, is 
full of pity for his brother who is still at 
school at Harrow, and admits, "It is 
awful for Reg, while this is going on. But 
I have written to try and cheer him up by 
saying the war is certain to last for two 
years, and by that time he may be able 
to join us." Lance-Corporal J. Butnell, of 
the Undaunted, sends his mother a vivid 
account of a brisk combat with four German 
destroyers, and concludes, "It is very 
exciting, the way you attack the enemy 



Keeping the Gates 149 

and, my word, my captain is a brick and 
goes right into them. I feel honoured to 
fight under such a gentleman " ; and lead- 
ing wireless telegraphist William Pegg, of 
the same ship, gives his father this little 
sketch of the same engagement : 

" We engaged the enemy's four destroyers 
and finished them off nicely in about an 
hour and twenty minutes — pretty smart 
work, eh ? I was on watch in the wireless 
telegraphy office, but went up on deck 
to watch the firing. It looked pretty 
awful to see their ships go down, especially 
one, whose magazine blew up in one big 
flare. A lot of German sailors were swim- 
ming, but, as you can guess, we had no 
time to pick them up ; we were too busy. 
You know it would have been quite possible 
to have got torpedoed through stopping. 
As it was they tried hard to torpedo us, 
but our skipper was there every time and 
simply altered our course and we steamed 
past them. They fired ten torpedoes at 
our ship alone. 

" The last to go took a lot of sinking, 
so we ordered one of our destroyers — the 



150 Keeping the Gates 

Legion, I think it was — to take off her 
survivors. She sent a boat to her, but 
when the boat was being rowed alongside 
the dirty cads opened fire and blew off a 
lieutenant's foot, and a seaman had his 
leg blown off. The latter has since died. 
Then we gave her a couple of additional 
shots to go on with, and she finished. 
We captured thirty Germans, including one 
officer. We had all our boats smashed by 
concussion from our guns, and missed a 
cloud of shrapnel by a few yards. One 
thing has been amply demonstrated : our 
captain is O.K., and everybody on board 
knows it. The way he manoeuvred our ship 
around those torpedoes was marvellous." 

More than once you read in the sailors' 
letters that they are " tired of waiting," 
and wish it were possible for them to land 
and help the soldiers, " because," says one, 
" they seem to be fighting against such 
terrible odds " ; while a man on the 
Venerable, well occupied off Nieuport in 
rendering that help, by shelling the Germans 
out of their trenches on land, is convinced 
that " we are the luckiest ship in the Navy, 



Keeping the Gates 151 

because we are in the thick of it and 
getting all the fun." But even the men 
who are left to that dreary game of waiting 
and watching, day and night, in the North 
Sea, know how to make the best of things ; 
they contrive to get some fun out of it too, 
as you may gather from this letter, which 
a Welsh officer recently received from his 
brother : 

" Thank you very much for your letter. 
Letters mean more to men now than they 
have ever done before. Life on board 
during active service is necessarily hard 
and grim, full of discomforts and alarms, 
but for all that it is astonishing how one 
and all make the best of things, how one 
fixes one's eye on the bright side. Occa- 
sionally one detects in ordinary conversa- 
tion the unforgettable fact that we are 
at any moment liable to be hurled into 
eternity. On a dark, bitterly cold, stormy 
night, for example, a man cheerfully re- 
minds the rest of us that a torpedo would 
make our last moments very unpleasant 
indeed in such a sea. 

" Personally I get a lot of fun out of my 



152 Keeping the Gates 

shipmates. My servant is a source of 
unending amusement to me. He is a 
Marine Reservist ; one knows that because 
just below the lowest of a series of very 
whiskery chins he keeps his tunic collar, 
and upon the collar is his badge and the 
letter ' R.' He has many protuberances 
in the equatorial regions ; he has several 
teeth knocked out on the port side of his 
face ; and keeps a nasty little excrescence, 
which was once an ear, on the starboard 
side. Both these disfigurements are relics 
of youthful scraps. He seldom talks. He 
walks with stupendous dignity. 

" Fortunately there are times when he 
loosens his tongue and unbends his dignity. 
At such a moment he confided to me that 
he is an ' Hex Pug.' This I gathered was 
only his way of saying that he is an ex- 
pugilist. I can only say that he thoroughly 
looks his part, notwithstanding the fact 
that years and fat have somewhat toned 
him down. 

" Then there is the bugler, a cheeky, perky 
little chap of fifteen. Unfortunately, every 
member of the crew, for no apparent reason, 



Keeping the Gates 153 

fetches him a clip on the ear if he happens 
to come within arm's length and provided 
there is no officer about. You will gather, 
therefore, that he walks through life warily 
and very circumspectly. But is he down- 
hearted ? No. He boldly faces this 
decidedly unpleasant situation with sailor- 
like pluck ; with a frantic effort he recovers 
his tongue again, and his features then 
reveal the satisfied and joyful condition of 
his soul. What if his outlook on life is 
made gloomy and melancholy when a clip 
is fetched on the ear ? Is it not immedi- 
ately made bright and cheerful again by 
deftly rescuing an elusive tongue ? 

" I always picture him as he appeared 
one night in the North Sea. We had a 
nasty surprise about 10.30. It was pitch 
dark or foggy at the time. The look-out 
suddenly came upon a warship about half 
a mile ahead. We made a recognition 
signal, but got no reply, simply because 
we were still in a bank of fog, and the 
other ship could not see our flashlight 
signals. Without exaggeration we were 
in full fighting trim within 60 seconds, 



154 Keeping the Gates 

every man — many only half-dressed — at 
his post, decks cleared, guns loaded, spare 
shells in readiness, aim set. The first 
sound of a bugle would have caused our 
guns to spit out steel death into the ship 
ahead. But where was the bugler ? The 
poor child was still fast asleep. In one 
second he was the centre of an agitated 
crowd. What a display of energy of lan- 
guage, of clips on the ear, of tongue swallow- 
ing, of its joyful recovery ! One large man 
shot him up the gangway and deposited 
him — a dazed and bewildered little fellow — 
upon the decks, a still larger man rammed 
the best part of a bugle down where his 
tongue usually slipped. With his custom- 
ary dexterity he rescued both the bugle and 
his tongue, and dolefully shouted, ' Where's 
me breeks ? I ain't got my breeks on.' 
Fortunately, at that moment our signal 
was repeated, and this time answered by 
one of our own ships. Within five minutes 
practically every man was in bed again, 
including the poor bugler, just as if nothing 
had happened." 

The other day, shortly after the North 



Keeping the Gates 155 

Sea fight, in which the Blucher was sunk, 
I fell in with a sailor who had taken part 
in it ; his ship was repairing in harbour 
and he was ashore on leave. A big, genial, 
capable-looking fellow, he walked with the 
leisurely seafaring roll of his kind, and 
was carrying under his arm a large, flat 
parcel, carefully wrapped in brown paper 
and tied round with string. We were 
going the same way and drifted easily into 
conversation, and when I made out that 
he was fresh from the latest sea victory I 
thought I might get a few descriptions and 
impressions from him. 

" How did you feel," I asked him, 
" when you were first under fire ? " 

" Oh, I was in that other scrap too," he 
said, " when we settled the Mainz." 

' You had a pretty hot time then," I 
suggested. 

" About the same as this last time," he 
replied. " It was warm while it lasted, 
but," he laughed, " it was jolly good. 
We were glad to get on to them, I can tell 
you. It was fine. A bit slow, I expect, 
for some of the chaps who didn't happen 



156 Keeping the Gates 

to be working the guns, but we all liked it. 
They'll give us a chance for another go 
soon, I hope." 

" You haven't had a look in yet at any 
of their best Dreadnoughts, have you ? " 
I inquired artlessly. 

" Dreadnoughts ! " he grinned. " They 
ain't got none. Dreadeverythings is all 
they've got, as our chaps say, and as soon 
as they like to bring 'em out we'll take 
care they don't go in again, don't you 
fear." 

I tried to lure him on into describing 
the battle, but he seemed to have been 
too busy to take particular notice. 

" They was running away all the time," 
he said, " and we was after them, peppering 
them a fair treat. They shelled us back a 
bit, but nothing to matter much. If you 
want to know what it was like, this," 
tapping the parcel under his arm, " is a 
picture I did of our ship in action." 

Yielding to my natural curiosity, he 
presently untied the string and produced 
from the brown paper a large painting on a 
sheet of cardboard. I am not going to 



Keeping the Gates 157 

pretend that, as a work of art, it showed 
any great talent ; to be quite outspoken, 
it was rather crude in the matter of execu- 
tion, but it had a certain rough and ready 
realism and was astonishingly spirited. 
There was a long, lean-bodied, black cruiser, 
going full speed with great plumes of 
black smoke fluttering from its funnels and 
a handsome wave splitting away from its 
prow and foaming mightily. Guns along 
the side of it were spitting out red and 
yellow fire, and round the ship and over it 
large shells were bursting in great blots 
and splashes of brilliant colour. 

" Capital," said I. "It looks impossible 
for anything to live in such a hail of fire, 
doesn't it ? " 

" Oh, I dunno," he returned placidly. 
" I daresay it looks a bit worse in a picture 
than we noticed it at the time. But 
that's what it was like. I showed it to 
my captain, and he was awfully pleased 
with it and wanted to buy it ; but I give 
it to him, and glad to, and it's hanging in 
his cabin now, and this is a copy of it 
which I painted for my mother. She'll 



158 Keeping the Gates 

like it. I didn't reckon my captain would 
think so much of it, but he did." 

" Pretty good sort, is he ? " I enquired. 

" Good sort ! " he spoke almost indig- 
nantly. " One o' the very best. There 
ain't a better officer in the Navy ; you 
take that from me. The pluckiest chap 
— it'd take more than all these Germans 
could do to upset him." For the first time 
a sort of enthusiasm seemed to get the 
better of him. " You ought to see him 
in action ! Takes no more notice of the 
shells than if they was confetti. Good 
sort ! — why, our chaps would do anything 
for him. Good sort ! Why, if he was to 
want the ship took into hell itself, he's 
only got to say the word. He knows that. 
So do we. That's the sort he is. A real 
gentleman." 

His heat had simmered down, and he was 
beginning to wrap the picture up again 
when I checked him to ask : 

" Which is your gun ? " 

" This is mine." He laid his finger on 
a noble cabbage of smoke with a crimson 
heart. " It was hot while it lasted, but 



Keeping the Gates 159 

jolly good. We helped to polish off the 
Blucher. I went in one o' the boats 
to help pick up some o' them Germans out 
o' the water after she'd gone down. Funny 
thing was, y'know," his face beamed into 
a slow, amused grin, " when we heard about 
that Scarborough bombardment, killin' 
women and kiddies, our fellows said no 
more saving drowning Germans — not after 
that ; and when we'd got the blighters 
safe aboard I reminded a pal o' mine about 
that, and he smacks hisself on the leg — like 
that — and says, ' Damme,' he says, ' I'd 
forgotten that ! ' And funny thing was 
so had I till that minute." 

He laughed quietly at the recollection, a 
big, genial, easy-going laugh, and we shook 
hands on it, and I left him feeling, some- 
how, prouder of that forgetfulness of his 
than I could have felt if he and his gallant 
comrades, remembering in time, had sung 
some silly Hymn of Hate against Germany 
and left their beaten enemies to drown. 



CHAPTER VIII 

From the Britains Overseas 

" Show the way, England ! 
Let that grim master 
Of earth's disaster, 
Let the War shadow 
But darken the sun — 
Trust your child, Canada, 
She will be with you, 
Shoulder to shoulder, 
Gun to your gun : — 
She will reply with you, 
Fight for you, 
Die with you. 
So wide to the world 
Be the old flag unfurled — 
Show the way, England ! " 

Wilfred Campbell. 

' ' Then each shall take with stubborn grip 
His rifle as he took his whip. 

And when the Flag's unfurled, 
The clerk shall drop his futile pen 
To lift his well-loved lance — and then 
A nation fronts the world ! " 

Arthur H. Adams (Australasia). 

There was a time, not so very long ago, 
when I used to argue that the idea of 
nationality was primeval and should be 

160 



From the Britains Overseas 161 

obsolete ; that it was a survival of crude 
tribal feelings, a local, a parochial gospel 
that was unworthy of an enlightened 
generation. I was all for a wide inter- 
national brotherhood, a realisation of the 
common humanity of all mankind that 
should know nothing of different countries 
and stop short at no accidental frontiers. 
I thought, and still think, it is almost 
as absurd to regard as aliens all men who 
live on the other side of the English Channel 
as it would be for the men of London City 
and the men of Southwark to treat each 
other as foreigners merely because the 
Thames divided them. But now I have 
modified those notions. I still believe in 
that ideal of international brotherhood, 
but I believe as strongly, too, in the idea 
of nationality. The two are not incom- 
patible ; they can and should exist side 
by side. A reasonable man need not stifle 
his own individuality in order to be able 
to live in the friendliest community with 
his neighbours. 

This war has taught us, among many 
other things, how inexplicable, how potent 



162 From the Britains Overseas 

and how beautiful a spirit is that of nation- 
ality. Who has not been thrilled by its 
mighty workings in France, in Russia, in 
Belgium, in Servia ? It may be carried 
to extremes, like everything else, and then 
it becomes a vice and a public nuisance. 
So far as one can see, the German race has 
over-indulged in it, and as a consequence 
the spirit that should be only in their 
hearts has got into their heads they are 
drunk with it, and, as drunken men often 
do, that have grown obsessed with a notion 
of their own amazing superiority and in- 
tolerably quarrelsome ; they have been 
foolishly fired by it to attack outside 
nationalities in a frenzied yearning to 
smash them into subservience and swagger 
over them triumphantly. Yet one cannot 
but admire, even in Germany, and despite 
the nameless brutalities with which she 
has sullied her record, the passionate love 
of country which has braced and united 
her people and brings her soldiers in close- 
packed ranks, as mere foredoomed " can- 
non-fodder," singing undaunted to their 
deaths. 



From the Britains Overseas 163 

But it is the larger, subtler, more finely 
human manifestations of this spirit of 
nationality that have filled me with pro- 
found wonder and given me a new love 
of my country and my own people. Here, 
in England, for instance, you have a man 
who has met with nothing but misfortune. 
Circumstances here have been hard upon 
him ; he has been poor, burdened with care, 
without hope, and at last has shaken from 
his feet the dust of the land that has proved 
so inhospitable and unkind, and has gone 
away to the other end of the earth in search 
of opportunities that were denied to him 
in the place of his birth. Far off, when we 
have forgotten him, he has established a 
home for himself, is enjoying a prosperous 
career, is happy and at rest. If a chance 
traveller from England visits him he speaks 
harshly to him of us ; he has a feeling that 
we wronged him and drove him into exile. 
Then one day news reaches him that the 
old country is at war ; that she is assailed 
by a powerful enemy, threatened with 
invasion, and calling her sons together to 
a struggle for very life. He does not even 



164 From the Britains Overseas 

hesitate ; he puts his private interests 
aside, forgets his present happiness and his 
past misery, knows only that the homeland 
is in danger and as swiftly as a ship can 
carry him he is back here to fight beside 
us for its safety, and if need be to die for 
it. We can understand this, but we can't 
explain it ; it is too big and fine a thing to 
be subject to our peddling little psychologi- 
cal dissections. 

But the sense of nationality moves men 
even more mysteriously than that. Per- 
haps your broken exile, instead of going 
into quite foreign parts, emigrates to one 
of the great British Dominions oversea. 
He settles down there, makes a position for 
himself, and feels he has done with the 
homeland for ever. Sons are born to him, 
the years pass, and he dies. Then one day 
War bursts upon us terribly, and the 
call goes forth, and those sons who have 
never seen their father's land, nor heard 
from him much that was good about it, are 
among the first to sacrifice their careers 
and hasten over to take their place with us 
in the firing line, eager to give their lives 



From the Britains Overseas 165 

sooner than the old country shall be 
worsted in the strife. 

Typical of the letters from Britons who 
have gone to live abroad was that received, 
in the initial stages of the War, by Colonel 
J. M. McMaster, commanding the 5th 
Battalion of the King's Liverpool Regi- 
ment. The writer had aforetime been a 
sergeant in the battalion, and wrote now 
to say, " I beg to offer myself as a volunteer 
for the front. I am thirty-nine, in the 
best of health, and hard as nails. I have 
arranged all my affairs here, and can pay 
my own expenses." So far from feeling 
that he was laying his homefolk under any 
obligation, he added : "I shall consider 
it an honour if you can view my offer 
favourably." An Australian who has four 
sons on active service, one in the Australian 
Navy, and three out with the Australian 
contingent that is helping to hold the Suez 
Canal against the Turks, says that all four 
volunteered promptly during his absence 
from home, and he is proud and glad that 
they did. One writing to tell him of what 
they had done, said : " The old country 



166 From the Bri tains Overseas 

wants all the fighting men she can get, 
and it is up to us to do our bit so we have 
joined and expect to embark before you 
get back " ; and another, explaining how 
he felt it impossible for him not to go 
concluded : " Don't worry. I shall do 
my best, and if the worst happens, anyhow, 
you will know that I did the right thing." 
And that is a noble, characteristic letter 
written to Mr. L. L. Grimwade, of Stoke- 
on-Trent, by his brother Edward, settled 
in New Zealand, who has sent one son to 
the war and is ready, if need be, to let 
the other go : "On this subject his mother 
is in liquidation, and his dad not much 
better. None the less, if the Motherland 
calls, Ted must go too ... I am prepared 
to give another son (as I have given one) 
and I am prepared to get into the fighting 
line myself. Further, I am prepared to 
suffer loss of fortune and see starvation 
rather than sacrifice the honour of our 
Empire. . . . My boy, Len, went away 
with his regiment yesterday. All we can 
say is ' The Lord bless the lad.' " There 
are South Africans serving in our new 



From the Britains Overseas 167 

Armies, and we know the heavy work they 
have undertaken for the Empire within 
their own borders. And Canada has an- 
answered the call as immediately and as 
whole-heartedly. " Thirty-three thousand 
of our boys have come over here already," 
as one who had come with them said to 
me, " and if three hundred thousand are 
wanted they will be ready before your folk 
ask for them." Privates in the ranks of 
those thirty-three thousand are several 
Members of Parliament, wealthy merchants, 
doctors, lawyers, University professors; 
clergymen, and certain financial magnates 
who equipped sections of the troops at 
their own expense. Amongst them also 
is a good sprinkling of Americans, several 
of whom abandoned enviable commercial 
positions in order to hurry over the border 
and be in time to sail with the first regi- 
ments to set out from Canada. 

I spent parts of two or three days last 
August with an American citizen who was 
over here on a month's holiday, and at 
first he was disposed to be puzzled and 
disappointed at what seemed to him our 



168 From the Britains Overseas 

indifference in the face of such a momentous 
crisis. 

" You don't seem to be half so excited 
about it in London as we are in N* York," 
he remarked. " Just before I left, if I 
went out at night, there were crowds singing 
the ' Marseillaise/ and once I heard them let 
themselves go on your National Anthem, 
waiting outside one of our newspaper offices 
to see the latest news flashed on to a huge 
sheet all up the front of the building. But 
here I go out at nights and everybody's 
comfortable and cheerful as usual and 
nothing more doing outside the newspaper 
offices than anywhere else." 

I tried to persuade him that we had set 
our teeth to see this job right through, 
and were working at it vigorously, 
resolutely, and with a thorough appreciation 
of its magnitude, though we were making 
no fuss about it ; and when I met him 
again a few days later he had satisfied 
himself that it was so. 

" Man," he cried enthusiastically, " I've 
been two days running and stood outside 
your chief recruiting station in Scotland 



From the Britains Overseas 169 

Yard, and there's a line of men four deep 
stretching clean out into Whitehall, and 
it never grows shorter, because as fast as 
the guys inside can attend to them and 
some more are let in, others have added 
themselves on at the other end of the line — 
all of them as full of ginger and as keen to 
get in as if it was the pit door of a theatre. 
It struck me dumb. When I could talk 
I spoke to one of your cops about it, and 
he was as unmoved as if he'd been made of 
wood. He seemed to pity my excitement. 
" Oh, it's like this every day," says he, as 
if there was nothing uncommon in it at all. 
I've chatted with some of your business 
people — solemn old boys some of 'em, 
and some of 'em as stodgy as they make 
'em anywhere, but you've only got to give 
them a scratch and you find under the 
surface they're all full of this affair and on 
fire with it. I believe I begin to understand 
you over here. You're a great people ; I 
admit it ; and I suppose like all big things 
you are solid and quiet. But you're doing 
it, and you'll get it done. I feel that in 
my bones. I've had a letter from an old 



170 From the Britains Overseas 

pal of mine in New York this morning. He 
tells me he and two other fellows were 
just bolting North to join your Canadian 
contingent. True-blue Americans all of 
them, and one the head clerk in his office. 
Mad it sounds, doesn't it ? No business o' 
theirs, eh ? But I dunno— perhaps it is 
because we haven't strained all the British 
blood out of us even yet. Quaint thing! 
Why, do you know when I stood watching 
those recruits outside Scotland Yard I 
found the tears in my eyes once, and had a 
frantic impulse to tack myself on the end 
of the queue and go and be one of them. 
I believe if I went there too much I should 
do it, too ! " 

I had not had a chance to talk with any 
of the Oversea soldiers until late one evening 
last December, when I was coming back to 
town from Reading, and designedly got 
into a railway carriage where five of them 
were seated. Four were kilties, and they 
had the four corners ; the other, a well- 
featured, rather shy looking youngster in 
khaki had a centre seat opposite me. Two 
of the kilties were stolid, uncommunicative 



From the Britains Overseas 171 

youths, who smoked and said nothing ; one 
in the right-hand corner facing me was a 
stout, genial, quiet man with black, twink- 
ling eyes ; the fourth, immediately on my 
left, was a tall, raw-boned, solderly looking 
fellow of a downright manner of speech that 
had a pleasant hint of a brogue in it ; and 
it was to him that I addressed myself : 

" I see there are a lot of you on the train 
here. You are not off to the front, I 
suppose ? " 

" To the front ! " with an exaggerated 
air of surprise. " No such luck. Why, 
I hear that Kitchener isn't going to send us 
out till about March, and by that time 
there won't be any sanguinary war to go 
to." 

" Oh, it won't be over by then," I said 
consolingly. 

" Won't it ? We'll see. I'll bet we shall 
see nothing of it, and I'm fairly fed up with 
messing about here all this time. I didn't 
come over here to play about on Salisbury 
Plain learning my ABC. I'm an old 
Boer War man. I was eighteen months in 
South Africa. I know my business, yet 



172 From the Britains Overseas 

here I am wasting my time forming fours 
and playing kiss-in-the-ring with a swarm 
of raw recruities. Mind you, I'm not 
blaming Kitchener. He knows what he's 
doing. Most of us are new hands, and have 
got to be properly trained before they're 
good for anything. But there's a good 
ten thousand of old Boer War men among us 
who are fit and ready to go this minute. 
Why can't we be sorted out and formed 
into separate battalions and let us go out 
now — at once ? That's what I say. What 
do you say, Wally ? Am I right ?" 

" Quite right, boy," agreed the stout 
kiltie, smiling and twinkling at us placidly. 

" If I'd known we were going to be set 
down here like this I don't believe I'd 
have come. I reckoned on going straight 
to the front. When I knew the old country 
wanted men, I wasn't going to stop out of 
it. What do you think ? I chucked a job 
worth ten pounds a week on purpose to 
come. So did Wally there. Didn't you, 
Wally ? " 

" Ah, I did," Wally contentedly agreed. 

ii Yes. There you are. Then they tell 



From the Britains Overseas 173 

us to run away and play on Salisbury Plain. 
I want to go to the front. I joined because 
I wanted to do a bit for the old place and 
have a smack at these blighted Germans. 
If Fd only wanted a holiday I'd have gone 
to the seaside. I'd ha' got decent grub 
there, at all events." 

" And don't you now ? " I asked gently. 

" Don't I now ? Look here ! Ever since 
we landed in this country we've had 
nothing but Irish stew. Nothing but Irish 
stew — day after day till I'm sick of the 
very smell of it. Is that so, Wally/' 

"That's so, boy," Wally chuckled. 
" Quite right." 

" I've no fault to find with the food," 
the khaki youngster put in a little diffi- 
dently. 

" Oh, haven't you ? " The lean kiltie 
was down on him promptly. " What do 
you have, then ? " 

" Bit of bacon for breakfast, porridge 
sometimes ; sometimes an egg." 

" What do you have for dinner ? " 

" Sometimes beef, sometimes mutton. 
And we always have a pudding— " 



174 From the Britains Overseas 

" My God, Wally," the other burst forth 
explosively, " this chap has pudding ! 
Whereabouts is your camp ? Pudding ! 
He don't know where he is. He's in 
Paradise ! What sort of pudding ? " 

" Oh, plum duff." 

" My— God ! " He sank back over- 
come with memories. " I haven't tasted 
plum duff since — since — Do you pay any 
extra for it ? " 

" Oh, yes." 

" Ah, well, there you are. You can have 
anything if you pay for it, but we're rough- 
ing it and taking what comes and nothing 
ever comes but Irish stew. And now, when 
we ought to be out yonder having a go in 
the trenches, because we've been good boys 
we're let off for a couple of days leave in 
London." 

"I'm going to Glasgow," said the khakied 
youngster. 

" What for ? " the lean kiltie demanded. 
" Isn't London good enough for you ? " 

" Oh, yes, and I shall stop in London if 
I can't catch the ii.io from Euston to- 
night. Do you think," he asked me, " we 



From the Britains Overseas ^5 

shall reach Paddington in time for me to 
catch that ? " 

"We might," I thought, "but it will 
mean a rush, and you'll only do it by the skin 
of your teeth." 

" I'll have a try," he said quietly. 

" What do you want to bother about 
Glasgow f or ? " enquired the kiltie. " Born 
there ? " 

" Oh, no. I was born in Canada." 

" Oh ! Relatives up there, I suppose ? ,; 

" No. I don't know anybody there. I 
just thought I'd like to have a look at it, 
that's all." 

He made a queer little nervous gesture 
with his hands and cast a quick, shy glance 
first at the kiltie, then at me, and was silent. 

We were silent too. I knew somehow, 
as well as if he had said it, that his father, 
perhaps his grandfather, was born in 
Glasgow, he had listened to their reminis- 
cent talk of the old home-place, and had 
a sort of longing to see it. I fancy the 
kiltie had a suspicion of this as well, for 
after he had said nothing for a while he 
looked at his watch and growled. 



176 From the Britains Overseas 

" You'll just about do it, man." 

And when we got out at Paddington he 
shouted, 

" There you are — there's a taxi yon. 
Nip into that." 

And the youngster took his advice. 

" Well, now," I said to the lean kiltie, as 
we were saying good-bye, "I'm awfully sorry 
you are having such a rotten bad time over 
here, and " 

" Look here — that's all right," he inter- 
rupted. " I daresay I've made the worst 
of it. I'd have come if I'd known it was 
going to be ten times as bad, and that's 
straight. But if a British soldier isn't 
entitled to grumble, then what rights has 
he got left to him, eh ? I don't mind 
about the stew, or anything. What I want 
is to go to the front. That's what I came 
for. Once I get out there, give me stew all 
the while till I get to Berlin and you won't 
hear me grousing about it — not a whisper. 
I want to be where the Germans are — 
that's my only complaint. Put me among 
the Germans, and there'll be nothing the 
matter with me." 



From the Britains Overseas 177 

Since then, some of the Canadian troops 
have been fighting gallantly beside our own 
out in France, and I hope and believe that 
kiltie from Canada has had his desire and 
is one of them. 

Even if we take it as nothing more than 
natural and magnificently right that these 
brothers of our own blood should stand so 
doughtily by us in the hour of our necessity, 
you cannot explain the enthusiastic loyalty 
of our Indian fellow subjects in the same 
way. Something of self-consciousness al- 
ways makes me a little ashamed when I 
speak in praise of my country or my 
countrymen, though I can really do so with 
a kind of detachment, I have had so in- 
finitesimal a personal share in whatever 
ruling has been done ; but it seems to me 
that had our methods of government been 
intolerant, oppressive, unjust, it must have 
been impossible for us to inspire any 
people under the sun with such a spon- 
taneous eagerness to serve us and lay down 
their lives in our cause as our Indian com- 
rades ha^e shown and are showing. We 
may have blundered at times, but I think 

M 



178 From the Britains Overseas 

that in the main we have striven to deal 
justly by them, we have aimed at giving 
them righteous rule, enlarging their liber- 
ties, and opening more and more all the 
ways in which they can fit themselves for 
self-government ; and, for my part, I 
accept their instant loyalty, their pride in 
counting themselves one with us, co- 
partners in the Empire, as an unhesitating 
recognition of this. 

If it had been otherwise, they and their 
Princes never could have offered their 
services with such generous promptitude, nor 
have fought by our other men so valiantly 
and with such invincible cheerfulness. The 
papers are rich already in stories of their 
heroism — of the terrible, irresistible charges 
of the Ghurkas, the Pathans, the Bengal 
Lancers, the steady valour under fire of 
Hindoo and Mohammedan regiments alike. 
But my business is not so much with details 
of the fighting as with the spirit in which 
the Indians, in common with the rest of the 
Empire, have risen to the height of this 
great argument, so I shall content myself 
with one or two notes that sufficiently 



From the Britains Overseas 179 

illustrate this. Again and again you read 
in letters from their officers of how keen 
they are to be advancing and to be allowed 
to quit the trenches and drive the enemy 
back at the point of the bayonet, and Eng- 
lish soldiers who have seen them on the 
field say, " Once they get the order to 
charge there is no holding them back " ; 
" Their officers can hardly get them to 
come out of the trenches when a battle is 
finished." " They are very eager for fight- 
ing. A lot came in the other day to have 
their wounds dressed, and as soon as the 
doctor turned his back they sloped back 
to the firing line." " The Ghurkas always 
want to be advancing and it is a job to 
keep them back." An Indian officer went 
to visit a Sikh soldier who was in hospital, 
shot through both legs and one arm, and 
said how sorry he was to see him so badly 
injured. " Sahib, what does it matter ? " 
replied the Indian, with a smile. " This is 
what we came out for." " This is a good 
war," said another Indian ; and another, 
when he was asked by Lieutenant Anne 
how he liked being in action, ejaculated, 



180 From the Britains Overseas 

" Oh, Sahib, all wars are beautiful, but 
this one is heavenly ! " " These Indians 
fight remarkably well," writes Lieutenant 
Gendre - Chardoux. " They had never 
heard the guns before, and at first they 
showed some nervousness, but they soon 
grew accustomed to it. The Ghurkas the 
other day gave it hot to some German 
regiments. They crawled in the fields for 
two hours without being seen by the Ger- 
mans. When they got quite close to the 
enemy they sprang up with their kukri in 
hand, and what was left of the Germans 
took to their heels. The Ghurkas are born 
fighters. They are very small men, well 
knit, with a Japanese face. They are as 
nimble as cats." 

The only Indian I have seen who has 
been at the front was at a kind of social 
gathering, when a number of wounded 
English and Belgian soldiers were present. 
He was a stately, upstanding figure of a 
man, dignified, silent, and carried his left 
arm in a sling. A lady who had been 
particularly interesting herself in the Bel- 
gians, passed over to him and after some 



From the Britains Overseas 181 

friendly questions about his wound asked, 
partly no doubt to make conversation and 
partly to satisfy a casual curiosity as to 
what part of India he hailed from : 
" And which force do you belong to ? " 
He eyed her deferentially, evidently rather 
doubtful of her meaning, then flashing his 
white teeth in a sudden smile, said, with the 
slightest touch of pride : 

" Madame, I am a Britisher." 



CHAPTER IX 

Seeing it Through 

The great word went from England to my soul, 
And I arose." 

Browning's Strafford. 

This morning, as I was sitting down to make 
a beginning of the present chapter I caught 
the monotonous, rather melancholy sound 
of a bugle, far off, blowing continuously 
on the same two or three flat notes. I 
knew what it meant, for in these last five 
months I have heard it many times ; so 
I stood at my window and presently could 
see, as I have seen before, a file of Belgian 
soldiers marching into view down the long 
road that winds in from the small town 
that lies beyond the fields. They were 
men who had been wounded. Discharged 
from hospital, they had been convalescing 
in the country hereabouts, and were making 
now for the railway station, that lies ten 

182 



Seeing it Through 183 

minutes below my house, on their way back 
to the front. There were about a hundred 
of them, marching three abreast, with the 
bugler leading. Shabby, war-worn, muf- 
flered and overcoated, none of them in a 
complete uniform, they trudged on sturdily, 
though here and there was one that still 
went with a slight limp. As they were 
passing, the bugler's wind seemed to give 
out and he rested from his blowing. In- 
stantly, all the men broke into singing the 
Marseillaise and, keeping step to that, it 
was good to see how their shoulders squared 
and their pace quickened. I watched till 
they had winded out of sight, and listened 
till their singing had lessened and died in 
the distance. 

There was something strangely touching 
in the sight and in the sound of them. 
There was all the desolation of Belgium in 
it, the crying of slaughtered women and 
children, the black ruin of shattered villages, 
the wail of the living for the dead, the 
misery of a desolated country and a people 
wandering homeless. But there was in it, 
too, an undercurrent of high courage, an 



184 Seeing it Through 

unbroken confidence that the end was not 
yet, and would not be until their wrongs 
were avenged and their country their own 
again. It was the defiant ring in their 
voices and something in the dogged set of 
their figures, I think, that brought back 
to my recollection the story told by our 
soldiers of how in the Belgian trenches 
they saw a woman placidly seated beside 
her husband. He was all that was left 
to her ; her children had been butchered ; 
her home was in ashes ; her other friends 
slain or scattered ; so she stayed there 
resolutely in the trenches by her man, 
keeping him supplied with ammunition and 
loading his gun for him. 

We are so afraid of appearing unpractical 
and foolish that it comes easier to say that, 
as a nation, we have gone into this war 
in self-defence, and because we knew that 
if Germany crushed France and Russia 
we should soon have to fight against her 
alone for our very existence. I won't 
answer for the diplomatists, but I repeat 
that, beyond question, it was a keen sym- 
pathy with France and above all a flaming 



Seeing it Through 185 

indignation against the barbarous cruelties 
that have made Belgium a wilderness and 
a place of tears, a feeling that our honour 
was pledged to the protection of that small 
nation, which appealed to the chivalry of 
our manhood and was largely responsible 
for the eagerness with which thousands of 
volunteers hastened to swell the ranks 
of our new Armies. It is this sentiment, 
principle — call it what you will — that has 
roused the women of our country and made 
them as warlike as their men ; and it is 
this that helps to stiffen the determination 
of our fighters in the field, and that rankles 
in the minds of our wounded and makes 
them impatient of their inactivity. " I 
shall be going back next week, and I'm jolly 
glad," one man said to me, who was inva- 
lided home near the end of the retirement 
from Mons. " If you had seen those poor 
devils of Belgians bolting out of blazing 
villages, terrified women and old men 
lugging bundles of things along with them, 
and poor little bits of kids crying their 
hearts out — I wake in the night and it 
makes me mad to remember it — you'd 



186 Seeing it Through 

never be able to rest till we have seen this 
thing right through." 

Turn over the letters from our soldiers 
and the same thing is constantly cropping 
up in them : " You can't possibly under- 
stand what those Belgians have suffered 
unless you could come over here and see for 
yourself. ' ' ' ' The worst part of it all is to see 
the poor little kiddies in their stockinged 
feet, and some with none on, straggling 
along behind their mothers. It is awful." 
Another tells of how he and his comrades 
could not bear to hear these children crying 
for food : "I have seen our soldiers give 
them their own meal and go to bed hungry 
after fighting all day." There are scores 
of such tales : "I gave my rations and my 
waterproof sheet to a Belgian woman with 
three children who were wet through and 
hungry." " We met a lot of tired women 
and children who had been driven out of 
their village . They were pretty well starved . 
We gave them our day's rations. It was all 
we could do for them." " There was a poor 
Belgian woman almost naked. My chum 
gave her his blanket. Do send him out 



Seeing it Through 187 

another blanket if you can. Send it care 
of me." " If you had seen some of the 
things that we have seen out here, you 
would not wonder if our fellows are roused 
and would sooner be killed to the last man 
than be beaten in such a war as this." 

But they will not be beaten, and they 
know it. Turn to another phase of their 
letters and you find behind all their humanity 
a settled confidence and a grim soldierly joy 
of battle that will carry them through to 
victory at all costs : " Mind you, we are 
doing this with a good heart, and whatever 
happens, we will win in the end." " We 
shall win, right enough. In fact we shall 
not hear of anything else." "It is tough 
work, very tough work, but we are out 
for business, and we are going to win, and 
to win well." "It is worse than murder, 
but it has got to be done." " Everyone 
here is sticking it." " It is going to be a 
long, long struggle, but it has got to be done, 
or we would never be able to live in peace." 
" We are not worrying ; we feel that our 
day has come." " We keep pegging away. 
Slowly but surely we are going to Berlin." 



188 Seeing it Through 

" I shall not be sorry when it's over, but 
rather than let them win I would sooner 
keep at war for ever." " We will struggle 
on till we beat them, no matter what lives 
it costs." 

This is how the men at the front are 
taking it, and if you look at the letters from 
the men in hospitals at home, here is a 
handful of characteristic utterances : "I 
had rough times of it, but I have that 
feeling — I want to be at the front." " I 
want to get back and be at 'em again." 
" When my time to return comes, I shall 
go with a good heart." " I shall be back 
again before long, and I shall not be sorry. 
I've got a reckoning to have with the 
Germans." " As you say, it is glory to 
have done a bit, but of course as soon as 
I'm better I shall be off to the front again." 
And this from another, anxious to mend 
and go back to his place beside his com- 
rades, puts into simple black and white 
what has been said to me in effect by 
several of the wounded men I have spoken 
with : " It is lovely lying in a nice soft 
bed instead of in the trenches, but so long 



Seeing it Through 189 

as the boys are fighting out there my mind 
is not at ease." 

Another very striking thing in many of 
the letters and stories from the front is 
their revelation of a completely selfless 
devotion to a sense of duty. The men 
who write them, or are the theme of them, 
are so obviously not out after any personal 
honour ; it is the honour of their country 
they fight and, if need be, die for, and 
bound up with that, for each man, is the 
honour of his regiment. If you would 
know the real spirit of chivalry and self- 
sacrifice that lies behind the pluck and 
light-heartedness with which so many of 
our soldiers have gone uncompelled to this 
war, it is in this anecdote related by a 
doctor in one of our Field Hospitals. After 
a furious bayonet charge, a young British 
infantryman was carried in unconscious 
and fatally wounded. At the last, he 
became conscious, but lay with fast glazing 
sight, painless but indifferent, till of a 
sudden he seemed to remember, half raised 
himself on his elbow, and looking up at the 
doctor with kindling eyes, asked anxiously, 



190 Seeing it Through 

" How did we do ? " " Magnificently, my 
boy," said the doctor. " Your chaps 
cleared the Germans out of the trenches 
and chased them for a mile." He dropped 
back with a satisfied sigh, muttered, 
" That's all right, then," and next minute 
was dead. And that same selfless devo- 
tion finds ever larger and nobler utterance 
in the letter, published in the Daily Tele- 
graph, that was written to a friend at home 
by Captain Norman Leslie, shortly before 
he was killed in action : 

" Try and not worry too much about the 
war units. Individuals cannot count. 
Remember we are writing a new page in 
history. Future generations cannot be 
allowed to read of the decline of the British 
Empire and attribute it to us. We live 
our little lives and die, and to some is given 
the chance of proving themselves men, 
and to others no chance comes. Whatever 
our individual faults, virtues or qualities 
may be, it matters not ; when we are up 
against big things let us forget individuals 
and let us act as one great British unit, 
united and fearless. Some will live and 



Seeing it Through 191 

many will die, but count not the loss. It 
is far better to go out with honour than 
survive with shame." 

This is not the spirit of a decadent nation, 
or of a nation that has finished its work ; 
and so far as my reading and experience 
go — and they have gone a good way — 
it is in this spirit, more or less consciously, 
that our people the world over have an- 
swered and are still answering the call of 
the Empire. 



EPILOGUE. 

Still from far off the listening spirit hears 

A music of the spheres, 
Though heard too close their sweet accord may round 

To one gross roll of sound. 

And War, that with its thunderous gloom and gleam 
Storms through our days, may seem, 

By peaceful hearths, in some far-coming year, 

A music, that was discord heard too near. 

The soul of beauty walks with aspect sad, 

And not in beauty clad ; 
And when God's angel comes, his passing by 

Blinds us like light too nigh. 

But the too-dazzling day that dims our sight 

Leads us, when all its light, 
Upgathered in Night's lifted hands afar, 

Orbs to the still perfection of a star. 



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